Keynote: OASIS/XML.org Update

Norbert Mikula, the Chief Technology Officer of OASIS (and also of DataChannel), presented the XML.org keynote. He said that OASIS (the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), formerly called SGML Open, was formed in 1993 and now has over 100 members.

In July 1999, the OASIS XML Conformance Subcommittee produced an XML Conformance Suite consisting of over 1,000 test cases. OASIS is in the process of developing a similar test suite for XSL.

Mikula announced during the conference a draft of a DTD/Schema retrieval system with support for both human and machine access. OASIS Registry and Repository Technical Committee is the group behind this effort, described as follows:

The objective of the committee is to develop one or more specifications for interoperable registries and repositories for SGML- and XML-related entities, including but not limited to DTDs and schemas. XML.org, an initiative of OASIS, intends to construct and maintain a registry and repository in accordance with these specifications, including an interface that enables searching and browsing of the contents of a repository of those entities. The registry and repository are to be designed to interoperate and cooperate with other similar registries and repositories.

As WDVL has documented on our extensive XML Sites Resource page, OASIS sister organization XML.org is the home for a DTD/schema catalogue for all industries.

Other efforts of OASIS include converting DocBook 3.1 (a DTD for documentation of computer software) to XML and producing an XML Tables Model based on the OASIS Exchange Table Model.

Electronic Business XML (ebXML) is an international initiative established by UN/CEFACT and OASIS concerned with cross-industry message exchange processes, guaranteeing interoperability, and reducing redundancy. ebXML was first announced in September 1999 with an 18-month project as its core effort.

Later in the conference, Mikula gave another OASIS presentation that yielded more details. He announced that the seminal xml-dev mailing list (in operation since 1997 and the birthplace of SAX) is moving to OASIS. In another explanation of XML.org's schema registry and repository, Mikula presented a number of scenarios for their use:

• register and deposit XML entity (schema); registry has metadata about schema; the repository is the physical storage
• browse/search for a type of schema
• register but not depositing schema; store it in a proprietary repository
• map from Schema A to Schema B; lookup mapping specifications (e.g., with XSLT)
• mapping two XML streams into a single output
• lookup a specific stylesheet that maps a particular markup language

Mikula had more to add about the ebXML.org effort also. He offered that there are two approaches to EDI:

• migrate from EDI to XML/EDI; maintaining semantics because we need something as soon as possible
• reformulate EDI in UML and XML; EDI is broken, so re-architect it for the future; this will take awhile

When asked about the relationship between XML.org and BizTalk.org, Mikula claimed that there was more common ground and complementary features than contention, but he offered no details.

Keynote: W3C Standards Update
What Happened at XML'99
Keynote: BizTalk Update