[xtm-wg] TopicMaps.Org & OASIS

["Eric Freese" <eric@isogen.com>]

As requested at the Austin meeting, Steve Pepper and I met with Laura
Walker, Executive Director of OASIS, to discuss how TopicMaps.org and OASIS
might be able to fit together.  This note provides a synopsis of the
discussions.

For those not familiar with OASIS (formerly SGML Open), it is a consortium
of vendors and users of open standards, including SGML, XML, and CGM.  There
are over 170 member companies from a wide variety of industries.  Some of
the past work which people may be aware of includes a catalog specification
and a table interchange scheme.  They currently sponsor work on ebXML, host
maintenance of the DocBook specification, and are the parent organization of
CGM Open.

Technical work within OASIS is done in two categories: technical committees
and member sections.

A technical committee within OASIS is, by nature, temporary.  The committee
is formed to accomplish a certain task and then disbanded.

Member sections are more permanent in nature and act essentially as a
sub-consortium under the OASIS umbrella.  CGM Open is a member section.
They have their own unique identity and can themselves form technical
committees to accomplish specific tasks.  Member sections can have their own
web site, do their own marketing, publish technical reports, etc. with the
assistance of OASIS staff.

Based on this, we recommend that TopicMaps.org become a member section of
OASIS.  This seems to be a natural fit.

The implications of such a move include:

1) Anyone wishing to participate in the committee work must be a member of
OASIS.  Invited experts are allowed, but actual work may only be done by
members.  Only members have voting rights.  OASIS has a dues structure based
on membership level and size of organization.  This information can be found
at the OASIS web site (www.oasis-open.org).

2) Member sections control a chunk of the OASIS budget to support marketing,
web site maintenance, staff time, etc.  That being said we need to provide a
certain level of dues support to the consortium.  The number mentioned for
the first year by Laura was $80-100K.  This number can be reached by members
stating they wish to participate in the member section.  There are currently
5 OASIS sponsor organizations who are also participating member of
TopicMaps.org (Sun, empolis, Mondeca, DataChannel, RivCom).  That gets us
half way there.  Several current participating members have expressed an
interest in joining OASIS at various levels.  In a seperate note, I will be
asking for indications of possible levels of membership for current
participating members and other participants in the mailing list.  I will
also ask current OASIS members if they would like to support the topic map
work under OASIS.

3) The current specification work undertaken by TopicMaps.org would revert
back to ISO.  As mentioned in a previous note, the XTM DTD will be added to
13250 as a normative annex.  The XTM specification would probably become a
technical report published by the OASIS member section with the copyright
being owned by OASIS (a legal entity).  New specification work (processing
model, constraint language, conceptual model, etc.) will be done under the
auspices of ISO.  Current members who wish to continue to work on
specifications will be able to so through OASIS relationship with the
International SGML/XML Users' Group.  The mission of the member section
would be geared more to community building and increasing the use and
useability of topic maps in general.  Possible work items might include:
interoperability issues, conformance suites, registry of PSIs, vertical
industry topic maps and/or ontologies, publication of technical reports,
etc.

4) The TopicMaps.org charter will be examined to identify any substantial
differences with the OASIS charter.  These will be identified and discussed,
but in general the OASIS charter and process will be adopted.  As a member
section, we can have our own bylaws.

We would like to have a public discussion about the feelings of the ENTIRE
community about this move, not just the voting members.  In this spirit,
please address any questions or concerns to the entire list.

A vote on this issue will be called in June.

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Eric Freese                                    Email: eric@isogen.com
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