Updates: OASIS, ISO/IEC, IDEAlliance
December 11, 2000
OASIS
In March 1997, OASIS
(Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information
Standards) became the new name for
what was previously called SGML Open, the standards group for the
SGML community since 1993. OASIS subsequently begat XML.org in May 1999. The table below
reflects the high-level scope of several standards organizations.
| OASIS and industry |
vertical industry applications |
| OASIS |
horizontal eBusiness framework |
| W3C and ISO |
XML, XSL, DOM, etc. |
| IETF |
protocols (HTTP, messaging, etc.) |
OASIS is supporting several
conformance efforts involving elaborate test suites for XML,
XSLT, Schema, and DocBook.
ebXML has 1800 participants from 60 countries.
On Dec. 6, 2000, it was announced that a newly formed OASIS
XML-Based Security Services Technical Committee (TC) will define a
common language called Security Services Markup Language
(S2ML) for sharing security information about transactions and
end users between companies engaged in online B2B and B2B2C commerce.
S2ML is a joint development effort of Art Technology Group,
Bowstreet, Commerce One, Jamcracker, Netegrity, Oracle,
PricewaterhouseCoopers, Sun Microsystems, VeriSign, TIBCO and
webMethods.
ISO/IEC
ISO /
IEC has a technical subcommitte called JTC1/SC34 whose mandate is
the Document Description and Processing Languages. See
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 Structure
- information description - SGML (ISO 8879:1986)
- information association - HyTime (Hypermedia/Time-based
Structuring Language. ISO/IEC 10744:1997), Topic Maps, and recently
XPath, XLink, XPointer
- information presentation - fonts, DSSSL (Document Style Semantics
and Specification Language. ISO/IEC 10179:1996)
New standards from ISO/IEC are Topic
Maps (December 2000) and
RELAX (Regular Language description for XML) (2001). RELAX is a
schema approach more for document people and web designers whereas
XML Schema will appeal more to database people and object oriented
programmers, according to author
Simon St.Laurent.
See also the International
SGML/XML Users' Group (ISUG).
IDEAlliance
IDEAlliance was formed
roughly one year ago, as WDVL
reported from XML99. The major initatives, all explained on the
IDEAlliance home page, are:
UDDI: The Green, White and Yellow
What Happened at XML 2000?
W3C Standards Update
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