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Preview of the OASIS standards registry
The recently announced OASIS standards registry offers a glimpse into the workings of e-business registries based on the ebXML specifications.
On 7 December 2003, OASIS's vice-president Karl Best announced to the OASIS membership the opening of its standards registry. While OASIS plans to officially launch the registry in mid-January 2004, it already provides the public a first-hand look at a working ebXML registry. The OASIS registry is found on the Web at http://registry.oasis-open.org.
The OASIS registry offers an index of documents written by standards development organizations (SDOs) and relates the documents to companies' or organizations' products that support the standards. According to the 7 December announcement, the goals of the registry are to “promote participation in technical activities, collaboration between SDOs, and broader awareness and adoption of completed technical work based on data standards.” The registry now has OASIS's specifications, but OASIS says it will open the registry to documents from other organizations. As of late December 2003, the registry also lists the Liberty Alliance, a group developing specifications for e-business privacy.
The registry itself is based on a standard for registry metadata developed by an ad hoc group chaired by Best, with participation from American National Standards Institute, the European Standardization Bureau that uses the French acronym CEN, and several other standards groups. The committee has since submitted its specifications to ISO, but the OASIS registry is the first implementation of this scheme on any scale. (Full disclosure: the author took part in a few meetings of the ad hoc committee, as part of previous employment.) The OASIS registry also uses the ebXML registry information model or RIM. Yellow Dragon Software, now part of Adobe, built the registry for OASIS.
The registry follows the ebXML RIM specifications and is organized in a database using a hierarchical structure. To the users, the hierarchy employs the familiar concept of folders and offers separate branches in the hierarchy for standards organizations (in the Stds Dev Org folder) and companies, a term that includes not-for profit and public sector organizations. Companies can list their products in the registry, and indicate the specific standards or specifications also listed in the registry that those products support. The registry will offer a glossary of terms, as well as tools for registering standards groups and companies. As of late December, the registry had only placeholders for the glossary and tools (two terms in the glossary).
Standards entries
But the registry already has enough examples of standards and companies to give a glimpse of the way ebXML registries can work for real. In the standards organization folder, the registry has a list of the OASIS technical committees. Each committee listing has the standards documents it has produced, and for each document, a set of metadata based on the standards registry committee specifications.
For example, OASIS's DocBook committee lists the latest two versions, 4.1 and 4.2 of the venerable DocBook specification for technical documentation. The registry's metadata for DocBook version 4.2 include:
- Name: DocBook v4.2
- Description: DTD for books and papers about computer hardware and software in SGML and XML.
- Email Address of chair/editor: (omitted here for privacy)
- Stds Dev Org's Designation: N/A
- URL for Specification: http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.2/index.shtml
- Subject: computer documentation
- Status: Final Approval
- Date Of Status Change: 2002-07-01
- Previous Versions of this Specification: DocBook 4.1
- Format: HTML
- Language: en (ISO language code, in this case English)
- Rights: http://www.oasis-open.org/who/intellectualproperty.php
The registry also provides the metadata in XML format. The specification URL leads to an OASIS Web page with links for downloading the DocBook 4.2 DTD and related items. The Rights URL links to OASIS's intellectual property rights page.
The entry for the DocBook 4.2 (and other specifications) also gives a set of relationships, called associations, between this version of the specification and other registry entries, specifically the OASIS DocBook committee and the earlier (4.1) version:
- DocBook v4.2 is Published by OASIS DocBook
- DocBook v4.2 Supercedes DocBook v4.1
- OASIS DocBook Develops DocBook v4.2
This association feature comes from the ebXML registry specifications. Another feature from the ebXML registry specifications is a unique identifier for each registry object, urn:uuid:59323f03-5f6d-4b07-495b-5b600c140f3f for DocBook 4.2. This unique identifier makes it possible to reference the entry in automated or federated registry searches.
Company listings
The company entries, as of late December 2003, represent OASIS members, where the companies and organizations can register their products and the OASIS committees in which the companies take part. Registration enables companies in the registry to provide metadata for each product and list the OASIS standards the products support.
For example, the Center for E-Commerce Infrastructure Development at Hong Kong University (CECID) has developed an e-mail based solution for ebXML messaging called ebMail. The registry entry for ebMail shows:
- Name: ebMail
- Description of Product: ebMail is a simple email client which helps users with minimal knowledge on ebXML to engage in B2B activities.
- Contact/Owner: (e-mail address omitted for privacy)
- Subject: ebMS, SMTP, CECID, freebxml
- Creator: CECID
- Format: Download
- Date: 2003-06-13
- Rights:Academic Free License
The term Subject allows for a list of keywords for searching and classification, and Date refers to the date the product was released.
The associations (relationships among other registry entries) for the product include:
- ebMail Implements ebXML MSG v2.0
- ebMail is owned by CECID
Each association is linked to its corresponding entry in the registry. Thus registry browsers can find ebMail from either the CECID or ebXML Messaging (MSG) entries in the registry.
The registry has a search capability, which comes in handy when the standards in question may not be evident from the name of the committee. For example, the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) standard comes out of OASIS's Security Services technical committee, but unless you already knew that relationship, you would need to use the search capability, or have a healthy helping of patience to find it through browsing. A search on the term SAML uncovers entries for SAML 1.0 and 1.1, and the OASIS Security Services committee.
The SAML search also shows the potential marketing value of the registry. According to the search, the registry lists a Sun Microsystems server as the only product supporting SAML. OASIS member companies supporting SAML and other OASIS standards will probably not want to waste much time getting their data into the registry.
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