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Subject: Season's Greetings from the OASIS team
Dear
OASIS Members,
The
Universal Business Language (UBL) became a globally accepted ISO
standard for
invoicing. A new version of the Open Document Format (ODF) also
made it into
the ISO catalog; ODF powers Google Docs, Libre Office, Star
Office, Polaris
Office and a cornucopia of other free business office suite
offerings across
all operating systems. On
the new TC front, ARIP, an augmented reality protocol, will
allow knowledge
specialists to sift through information with gestures, touch and
heads-up
displays. ARIP will usher in the future of documentation that
has been
tantalizingly portrayed in movies since Spielberg's Minority
Report. The
CXS TC set out this year to standardize the delivery of
personalized web
content through a context server, an important tool in the
arsenal of genuine
customization. The
Bioserv community promises to facilitate the use of biometrics
and
biometric operations over a service-oriented architecture, and
to increase the
efficacy with which biometrics are implemented. The
XLIFF folks have launched a second TC, XLIFF OMOS, to further advance payload and
metadata
interoperability in the globalization,
internationalization, localization and translation space. The
COEL group is developing standardized, transparent technical
frameworks to
support the successful formation and growth of a business
ecosystem aimed at
providing personalized services. If you're thinking "personal
data
analytics", you're right. To
top off this future-oriented list, the Cyber Threat Intelligence
(CTI) TC has
gathered a massive community of co-proposers around its goal to
define a set of
information representations and protocols to support automated
information
sharing for cybersecurity situational awareness, real-time
network defense, and
sophisticated threat analysis. This effort will codify STIX,
TAXII and CyBox as
international standards and take this critical work to the next
level. Is
anyone paying attention? You bet they are. The European Patent
Office says ANSI
and OASIS standards are by far the most referenced IT standards
in existence,
which is flattering when you consider the august company we’re
in. Beyond the
international recognition your work is getting, you're earning
something
intangible and far more important: respect. You can be proud of
that. OASIS
staff certainly is. And
yet, we will be rejoicing with restraint because the global mood
is somber:
it's harder to read the economy than the proverbial tea leaves;
unrest and
violence are ubiquitous and disheartening, disrupting travel and
trade; and in
our field, not a day goes by without another data breach. Unlike
last year, I
can at least report that CTI is the beginning of an answer to
this problem. The
computing trends we had identified together last year have
cemented into a
cultural shift. Recently, my 80-year-old father proudly
announced that he was
using the Cloud. When I asked him what he meant, he said that
his Mac backups
were in iCloud. I'm afraid I burst his bubble when I told him
that he was in
the Cloud in many other ways. He's a respected blogger in
France, and his blog
is hosted on Wordpress. We also share family photos, poems and
sometimes songs
my nephew creates on Box. My parents check out my videos on
Youtube, and
sometimes I'll save something for them to download from my
public Dropbox
folder. The list goes on. Neither my dad nor millions of other
folks using
these services tend to think of this as the Cloud. For them, the
services are
an extension of their device. Facebook is not some remote region
hallowed by
St-Zuckerberg, it's a part of their phone or tablet. It's not so
much that, to
speak like the Buddhists, we are expanding our consciousness to
encompass the
globe, it's that the globe is coming into our computing devices,
driving an
unprecedented consumption of user-generated content in the
process. If you
doubt me, just watch your kids or your spouse immerse themselves
in Instagram
with the sort of focused attention and delight that used to be
reserved for the
season finale of Lost. This
irruption of the planet into our personal spheres has been
particularly hard on
TV networks, movie and music studios and PC makers, because
they're used to
thinking of information as one directional, from their hub to
everyone and
everywhere else. It has also been hard on the Web: each app
creates
its own isolated stream of information, its own web backwater so
to speak, but
the economics of capturing "eyeballs" and keeping them fixated
are
such that these backwaters rarely connect with each other. This
ferocious
competition for usage time has definitely disrupted content
sites like Yahoo,
AOL and MSN. Open
Standards and Open Source -- areas that were once viewed in
conflict with one
another are now accepted as complimentary. Code can be a great
way to get
standards into use faster and identify issues mid-stream;
Standards ensure
interoperability and portability and can make APIs more stable.
To that end, OASIS has
launched Github-based
Open Repositories, a new option for TCs that would find value in
working on
standards WHILE storing code or artifacts in one place. Despite
the seismic changes in the IT world, I'm convinced standards are
here to stay
because what we provide--an agreement to do things in an
interoperable,
portable way--will matter even more tomorrow than it does today.
Ultimately, users don't care about platforms. What’s more
(although this may be
a shocker to our industry), they don't care about software
either. Users just want
to be able to access and use their data and consume their
content anywhere,
anytime. Web and Cloud standards make this possible. Similarly,
standardized APIs and protocols make it possible for people to
communicate with
the things they own and for things to talk to each other.
Self-driving cars
anyone? That will require standards, from both the policy and IT
sides. OASIS
aims to be your ‘one-stop interop shop’. If you have a project
that requires
either standards, or open source, or any kind of artifact you
need to store in
a repository; and if you need to have these projects governed by
a clear
process and industry-vetted IPR, OASIS is the right home for
you. If you’re
working on something broader than a TC, OASIS can provide an
“org-in-a-box”
that allows you to outsource all the difficult work of standing
up an alliance,
a consortium, an association or a special interest group. We’ll
even facilitate
your community and help it work harmoniously to reach its
intended
deliverables. You can do this under the OASIS brand or under
your own
brand—it’s up to you. At
the other end of the standards spectrum, we’re looking into
self-certification
to allow implementers of your work to make a public point of
adopting
it. So
that’s our one-stop-interop shop in a nutshell: from budding
specification all
the way to full-blown standard, possible global recognition in
ISO, IEC or ITU,
possible referencing in European procurement, or possible ANSI
accreditation if
that’s the route you prefer; with a side of Open Source should
you require it.
And possible self-certification if there’s a business case for
it. This in
addition to all the marketing benefits we continue to provide,
from focused
industry events to high-quality, high-visibility interop demos. We
believe this will carry us over as an organization into the next
decade and
will make us a solid and preferred home for ground breaking
technical work. My
door is always open. If you have suggestions for ways we can
best serve you or
want to share your ideas of where standards are heading, I want
to hear about
it. Listening and acting upon feedback is what you hired me to
do. Thank you for the trust you place in me and my staff. We appreciate it deeply, and want to make sure you feel acknowledged, supported and served as well as you deserve to be. Happy Holidays, and best of health in the New Year.
Very
truly yours, -- Laurent Liscia, CEO OASIS: Advancing open standards for the information society (510) 669-1261 Follow OASIS on: LinkedIn: http://linkd.in/OASISopen Twitter: http://twitter.com/OASISopen Facebook: http://facebook.com/oasis.open Take a tour of OASIS at: http://www.oasis-open.org/home/tour.php |
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