OASIS News Special Edition: 2004 Symposium Highlights

["Carol Geyer" <carol.geyer@oasis-open.org>]

OASIS News Special Edition: 2004 Symposium Highlights
7 May 2004
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A Message from OASIS President and CEO


Last week's OASIS Symposium in New Orleans was an enlightening, stimulating,
and most productive event. I would like to express thanks to the OASIS
Technical Advisory Board who organized the program and the nearly 200
members and non-members who participated in the variety of activities over
the five days. 

Some comments from attendees included: 

"The New Orleans event was very helpful for us; we now have a much greater
sense of what it really means to be a part of OASIS--and it feels good."
--John M. Greacen, chair of the OASIS LegalXML Member Section Steering
Committee.

"The Symposium was a tremendous success. We accomplished a lot and made some
valuable connections." --Duane Nickull of Adobe, chair of the OASIS ebSOA
TC.

In my Monday morning welcome, I acknowledged the expansion of our
membership, both geographically and functionally. Yet in the midst of all of
these changes, we still need to appreciate and reinforce the core values of
OASIS--our open process, member-driven agenda, and transparent governance.

Symposium attendees were challenged by our first keynote speaker, William
Stangel, Senior Vice President and Enterprise Architect at Fidelity
Investments Systems Company. He described his view on what end-users need
from standards organizations such as OASIS:
1. Higher level services standards (collaboration, content management,
portals)
2. Streamlined data standards (such as common core vocabularies and
processes with industry specific extensions)
3. Fewer competing standards
4. Simplicity (package the resulting standards for ease of implementation)

Bill emphasized that we need to 'come to consensus quickly' and find ways to
'keep it simple' for adopters.

Monday's industry panel was also a 'must see' session.  We assembled a group
of experts from RosettaNet, Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG), and
Chemical Industry Data Exchange (CIDX), moderated by an executive from SAP.
The panelists stressed the need to build standards that can reliably handle
long-term interactions with complex data. They maintained the current
document-centric model will not work in the future with messages containing
50MB or more of data. They called for commonality between the internal
choreography and external collaboration spaces. Several panelists pointed to
a need for a common vocabulary to help with increasing cross-industry
interactions. (Many are active in the OASIS UBL TC for this reason.) While
these industry groups are implementing various OASIS Standards for
e-business in production, including ebXML specifications, OASIS Web services
specifications such as UDDI, and our security standards. They made it clear
that enterprise users want to see a migration path for the interoperation
and convergence of all of these methods, not a battle between competing
camps.   

With OASIS as the source of more completed Web services standards (UDDI,
WSRP, WSS) and the most WS specs under development (over a dozen OASIS Web
services TCs), it's clear our consortium should take a leadership role,
working with these industry organizations, to define such a migration path.


That Call for Action led nicely into our Birds-of-a-Feather session on
Advancing a Service-Oriented Architecture Based on ebXML and Web Services.
Many OASIS members gathered here to explore ideas on applying input from the
industry panel in the work of the new OASIS ebSOA TC.

Our keynote speaker on the second day, Thomas Koulopoulos, founder of
analyst firm, Delphi Group, emphasized that "standards create liquidity" by
providing a stable path for implementation.  He stressed that our work
provides a pathway to innovation, certainty in an uncertain environment.
Citing many examples of how companies today hesitate to invest in rapidly
changing technology, Tom concluded that standards produced through open
processes like that of OASIS provide a point of trust upon which companies
can invest with a greater perceived value of liquidity and financial return.

Surrounding these keynotes and industry panel were a broad range of in-depth
technical presentations and user implementation examples about reliable
infrastructures, focusing on four major themes: transactions; messaging;
security; and metadata and use cases. Most provoked insightful dialog and
some spirited debate.  The discussions continued long into the breaks, over
lunch and through the receptions, as the software technologists interacted
with end users and all took time to express their viewpoints to staff and
members of the OASIS Board of Directors.  There were lessons learned; one
certainly being that when overlapping specifications are discussed, clearer
rules and guidelines for speakers need to be established in order to ensure
fair, balanced comparisons. Still, the robust debates in New Orleans made it
clear that OASIS standards projects are at the front edge of the development
of Web services and service-oriented architectures, and are the sharp focal
point of tremendous interest, effort, and product development in our
industry.  

Wednesday's "Reliable Infrastructures for eHealth Workshop," jointly
sponsored by OASIS and CommerceNet, drew speakers and participants from
major healthcare organizations in both the US and Europe. Participants
discussed potential applications of standards to fulfill specific critical
healthcare dataflows, and reviewed some recent implementations and
demonstration projects for meeting transactional and epidemiologic data
needs. Significant interest was expressed to form an OASIS TC to carry
forward the ideas and the requirements of these organizations. Interested
parties should contact brett.trusko@oasis-open.org.

Symposium presentations will be available by noon Monday, 10 May, at 
http://www.oasis-open.org/events/symposium/oasis_symposium.html.

We were also able to host meetings for 18 OASIS TCs and the Steering
Committee of the LegalXML OASIS Member Section. We deeply appreciate the
generous support of the Symposium sponsors and the enthusiastic
participation of our members. Staff will work to provide similar
opportunities for future face-to-face interactions.

So what did the Symposium show us?  It clearly proved that while our
membership and the activities at OASIS are diverse, our members want to come
together, learn from each other, and openly debate the important issues that
affect the community.  This type of vibrant participation can only lead to a
healthy environment for the development, convergence and adoption of
e-business standards. 

In order to keep this vibrancy alive, it is essential that our Board of
Directors and the Technical Advisory Board continues to reflect the wishes
of our members. There is still time to nominate candidates (until May 24th)
and submit questions to the Board of Directors nominees (until May 15th). 
http://www.oasis-open.org/private/2004board_elections/index.php

At OASIS, our technical agenda and governance are driven by our members. We
acknowledge, applaud, thank, and depend on you all for your continued
support.

Patrick Gannon
President & CEO
OASIS
patrick.gannon@oasis-open.org