Submission to the
ISO/IEC JTC1 SC34 Plenary
Report from the
Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Systems
(OASIS)
May 2006
Topics:
- Introduction
- Brief Progress Report on ISO/IEC 26300
- Progress in Standards Collaboration
- Methods for Collaboration in Standards Maintenance and Development
Dear colleagues:
We are pleased to be able
to join the Subcommittee for its plenary in Seoul this week. We would like
to extend our thanks to the local meeting sponsors, the Korean Agency for
Technology & Standards, for their very congenial hosting, as well as
the many instances of assistance and support that our community has enjoyed over the past
decade. Korean governmental bodies and industries occupy a special
place globally, as one of our most creative and robust communities of global adopters
and implementers of open standards for e-commerce. OASIS is pleased to
have several Korea-led technical committees, as well as a Korean language version
of our main news feed that is archived at:
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/oasisnewskr/.
and may be subscribed by a message to:
oasisnewskr-subscribe@lists.oasis-open.org.
Introduction
OASIS is a member-led, international non-profit standards consortium concentrating
on open standards for global e-business. As you know, OASIS has a number
of specifications and projects that give us a strong interest in the methods
developed in and supported by SC34. This domain will increase in strategic
importance. Some of the foundational global standard methodologies for structured
information -- what the ISO/IEC 14662 model calls the functional service
view (FSV) -- are becoming stable and widely used. Other parts of the FSV
seem likely to resolve and commoditize over time. To some degree, vendor
and press attention continues to focus on elaborations and options for XML
and its associated methods, SOAP, ebXML, the first web services standards
and so on. But as these FSV features become tooled and available, the attention
and needs of XML developers and implementers increasingly turn to richer
functions and business content -- the 14662 model's "Business Operations
View". A central focus of this increased demand is knowledge management
and the interfaces of XML artifacts with human intelligence. This returns
our community to a stronger focus on the same issues of knowledge representation
that gave birth to SGML and XML (and OASIS, originally
named SGML Open), as well as the
interests of SC34.
Among
projects at OASIS with a strong focus on K.R. issues are:
OASIS
Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) TC,
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/xdi/
OASIS
Extensible Resource Identifier (XRI) TC,
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/xri/
OASIS
Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC,
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/office/
OASIS
Published Subjects TC,
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tm-pubsubj/
OASIS
Semantic Execution Environment TC,
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/semantic-ex/
OASIS
XRI Data Interchange (XDI) TC,
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/xdi/
These join a number of
other important OASIS projects with relationships to the work of SC34,
including:
OASIS
DocBook TC, http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/xdi/
OASIS
OpenDocument Format (ODF) Adoption TC, http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/odf-adoption/
OASIS
RELAX NG TC, http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/relax-ng/
OASIS is pleased to be an active Category A liaison to JTC1 SC34, and to enjoy various
shared interests and members with the Subcommittee's activities. We
look forward to a continued strong and productive relationship.
Brief Progress Report on ISO/IEC 26300
OASIS and our
OpenDocument Technical Committee were very pleased to see the broad
ballot response and helpful suggestions from JTC1 and SC34
participants in the recently successful ballot on our submission of
the Open Document Format for Office Applications v1.0 to JTC1, to
become an International Standard pursuant to the JTC1 PAS rules:
http://www.iso.org/iso/en/commcentre/pressreleases/2006/Ref1004.html
As I believe the
Subcommittee is aware, our OASIS TC has reviewed and is processing
the helpful comments provided via JTC1, and will report to OASIS a
technical recommendation shortly, which we will review and bring
forward, as appropriate, as the disposition report of the PAS
submitter. It is our hope that we will be able to incorporate a
number of the helpful comments that have been received, consistent
with the rules of both organizations, and the need to respect the
integrity of the substance of the technical work to which the ballots
relate.
As disclosed in our
original PAS submission for transposition, OASIS and its TC plan to
conduct the ongoing maintenance of the submitted specification,
including the collection and promulgation of errata, implementation
experience and possible feedback towards future improvements. The
TC's current members have indicated that they are prepared to remain
involved in order to support this effort. OASIS has requested that
any change or improvement proposals be cycled back through an OASIS
technical committee for inclusion in errata (if the correction of a
defect) or a future v2.0 version (if in the nature of amendment or
revision), to be developed by OASIS. If future major versions with
substantive changes are advisable, OASIS expects to seek to offer
them for re-transposition by JTC1, after OASIS approval under its
usual rules, in support of OASIS' policy goal to ensure convergence
and avoid "forked" specifications.
Progress in Standards Collaboration
OpenDocument is only one of a number of our successful submissions of OASIS Standards to
the international de jure standards authorities. OASIS submitted its
four completed specifications comprising the e-business XML (ebXML)
project in 2004, and CEFACT submitted its Core Components methodology
as the fifth part later that year:
http://www.ebxml.org/
http://www.iso.org/iso/en/commcentre/pressreleases/archives/2004/Ref904.html
http://www.oasis-open.org/news/oasis_news_03_29_04.php
The remaining elements of ebXML are being completed by OASIS for submission to ISO,
along with updates (by the original OASIS technical committees) in the form
of versions 3 of the v.2 works submitted as ISO 15000:
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/17817/
In addition to the submission of OpenDocument to JTC1, OASIS and ITU-T currently are
completing the approval process for the submission of the widely known
OASIS Standards for security:
Security
Assertion Markup Language (SAML),
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/security
eXtensible
Access Control Markup Language (XACML),
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/xacml
These specifications bring a rich degree of security assertion, access policy and identity
management taxonomy and capability to XML-using systems. Issuance of
the final specifications as ITU-T Recommendations is expected this
summer. OASIS has made and is contemplating several additional
submissions to de jure bodies and other standards consortia,
to further the promotion and widespread adoption of its work, and
open standards generally, in a global connected information environment.
Methods for Collaboration in Standards Maintenance and Development
We are in the early days of some aspects of our field of information and structured data.
The speed of development of (and demands for) wider, scalable uses
and an ever-increasing list of features is remarkable. In some
cases, our shared community has more experience with inventing
standards than finalizing and maintaining them. Multiple parallel
and sometimes substitutable methods often are under development.
There are uncertainties associated with a variety of innovations and
changes to information models and computation services, including the
emergence of free and open source software methods, and the uneven
application of patent, licensing and trade regulation rules to this field.
Nevertheless, we should view the slight degree of chaos in our field as signs of strong
demand and robust experimentation, and welcome this high level of
activity with open arms. The main cohort of XML-based e-business and
e-commerce data standards is only now just starting to stabilize and
mature. OASIS strives to serve as a facilitator both for this
experimentation, but also for the resolution of its outputs into
modular parts, optimized for combination into diverse systems and
with multiple legacy methods. Our submissions to the international
de jure organizations, and plans for continued collaboration
there, are in service of those goals.
In pursuing those goals, we are learning some preliminary lessons that we are pleased
to share as observations with our colleagues in JTC1.
- An open, transparent, heterogenous process is essential. To assure both
quality and global relevance, the standards criteria established by
global trade agencies (as well as many national governments and
commercial users) stress the process quality of standards
development organizations. There must be genuine opportunities for
public and user input, coupled with a development and versioning
practice that supports their evaluation and incorporation in
predictable, measured sequences. Obvious sources of guidance include the WTO
Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade and JTC1's own PAS criteria.
- Rules are not enough. There must be a spirit of inquiry, improvement and
cooperation, both to indicate a genuine willingness to improve, and
sufficient process and leadership to drive that improvement. Even
the best-run and fairest venue can accidentally become a monoculture
if there is not continual effort to include and fulfill the needs of
many users and many vendors in a diverse world of implementation.
At times, a fine idea may suffer simply for being exposed to an
insufficient variety of implementations.
- We are writing for a permanent audience, not next fiscal quarter's headlines.
This may be a principle comfortable for and familiar to ISO/IEC, but it
occasionally is a surprise in some of our own innovation-driven and commerce-oriented
communities. Standards are agreed compromises; safe and sound compromises
take time; making them safe (through consultation and consensus) often
takes more time than a method's proponents might initially expect.
- Each standards organization represents its own ecology of users and stakeholders.
That ecology reaches compromises, or at least homeostasis, and
issues specifications informed by its own experience, domain needs,
licensing rules and style. It has been our observation that
attempts to create joint or composite special bodies for
collaboration often are difficult. The participants and
stakeholders in each standards community exercise considerable
effort to assess, and norm themselves to, the rules and ecology of a
given organization. In that sense, we have brought them into our
community, which is a good thing: often a single enterprise or
organization will happily join multiple projects, once they've
reached a level of comfort with the sponsoring venue. But when we
create some new structure, they often must re-assess from the start
whether to join, contribute or fund the activity.
Even the best alliances are not perfect. Participating groups often must find a basis for
confidence that a resolution system, or graceful degradation path, is
in place if agreement is not reached across various boundaries. So
we have generally found more success with serial work between
organizations, permitting collaboration with sequential review, but bound together by
four necessary elements:
- Clear terms of reference and cooperation, with provision for success and failure
both.
- Some degree of shared participation, to convey continuity of purpose.
- A concentration on modularity, allowing composition with multiple options and
environments, as opposed to hewing to a central mandated
architecture or device set.
- Thoughtful, diplomatic efforts to respect the needs of each organization,
and ensure genuine responsiveness on both sides, while maintaining a community
of purpose and shared progress.
We are pleased that OASIS' collaboration here with JTC1 SC34 may serve as a model for
that approach, and hope that it will be helpful for other
organizations. Thank you again for the opportunity to work
cooperatively with your organization.
Respectfully submitted,
James Bryce Clark
Director of Standards Development
OASIS
May 2006
