OASIS (organization)

From Free net encyclopedia

This page is about a standards organization. For other uses of the word OASIS, see Oasis (disambiguation).

The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) is a global consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of e-business and web service standards.

Members of the consortium decide how and what work is undertaken through an open, democratic process.

Technical work is happening in the following categories: Web Services, e-Commerce, Security, Law & Government, Supply Chain, Computing Management, Application Focus, Document-Centric, XML Processing, Conformance/Interop, and Industry Domains.

1 Specific standards under development by OASIS technical committees
2 Patent disclosure controversy
3 See also
4 External links

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Specific standards under development by OASIS technical committees

OpenDocument (OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications) is an open document file format for saving office documents such as spreadsheets, memos, charts, and presentations.

SAML - Security Assertion Markup Language, a standard XML-based framework for the secure exchange of authentication and authorization information.

XRI - eXtensible Resource Identifier, a URI-compatible scheme and resolution protocol for abstract identifiers used to identify and share resources across domains and applications.

XDI - XRI Data Interchange, a standard for sharing, linking, and synchronizing data ("dataweb") across multiple domains and applications using XML documents, eXtensible Resource Identifiers (XRIs), and new method of distributed data control called a link contract.

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Patent disclosure controversy

Like many bodies producing open standards, OASIS has a patent disclosure policy requiring participants to disclose intent to apply for software patents for technologies under consideration in the standard. Like the W3C, which requires participants to offer royalty-free licenses to anyone using the resulting standard, OASIS offers a similar Royalty Free on Limited Terms mode, along with a Royalty Free on RAND Terms mode and a RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory) mode for its committees [1] .

Controversy has arisen because this licensing allows publication of standards requiring licensing fee payments to patent holders, effectively eliminating the possibility of open source implementations. Further, contributors could initially offer royalty-free use of their patent, later imposing per-unit fees, after the standard becomes accepted.

Supporters of OASIS point out this could occur anyway since an agreement would not be binding on non-participants, discouraging contributions from potential participants. Supporters further argue that IBM and Microsoft shifting standardization efforts from the W3C to OASIS is evidence this is already occurring.

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