Will OASIS matter? (was OASIS individual memberships)

[Dan Brickley]

Just a quick followup to qualify my post, as an offlist response
suggests that I might be interpreted as questioning the need for OASIS
or similar efforts.  I certainly didn't intend that, and have every
expectation that both  OASIS and BizTalk can make themselves
indespensible in a 'community centre', 'consensus building' and 'schema
blessing' role. I'm just wary of the DTD-discovery and DTD-repository
expectations people seem to have of such organisations being redundant
since the search engines will likely address many of these needs. --dan
 

On Fri, 9 Jul 1999, Dan Brickley wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 9 Jul 1999, Andrew Layman wrote:
> 
> > Adding to what David said, W3C management have made it clear that the W3C is
> > not going to generally be in the position of endorsing domain-specific DTDs
> > or schemas.  This means that DTDs and schemas are going to need other
> > development and cataloging services, e.g. Oasis and BizTalk.
> 
> There's a big distinction there between development and cataloguing;
> simply being able to _find_ pertinent DTDs and schemata doesn't strike
> me as a great value added service. Development, on the other hand....
> 
> 
> We already have an industry focussed around discovery and cataloguing:
> web search engines, portals, directories. We're already seeing
> things such as specialised MP3 search options as natural extensions of
> these; since XML schemas are just more Web data, it seems to me likely
> that a few such services will start offering schema-oriented searches.
> 
> Trust is of course a big issue -- but if professional societies and
> industry bodies could circulate (by email, NNTP, CD-ROM) digitally signed
> schemata and inter-schema crosswalks, these would fit very well into the
> search-engine oriented approach to discovery. Oasis, BizTalk might take
> on this role, but I'd imagine the existing engines would be well set up
> to compete.
> 
> Development, discussion, data modelling and consensus building,
> (particularly regarding vocabulary overlap), seems of far more
> importance. And this latter is a very human, social service which
> might(?I've no idea) turn out to need input from more stakeholders than
> are inclined to pay to join.  It's this "community centre" aspect, and
> prospect of such communities pragmatically blessing certain schemas,
> which seems a plausible role for OASIS, BizTalk etc. Any techno-centric
> database, search, cataloguing role seems to be in direct competion with
> the major search services.
>  
> I can't see any technical reason why solutions for discovery
> and trust w.r.t. normal XML (and HTML and MP3...) documents won't also
> serve equally well for discovery and trust management of XML schemata,
> mappings, crosswalks, business rules etc etc. After all, wasn't this
> synergy the whole point of moving to an XML syntax for next-generation
> DTDs? (ie. to allow the special case to borrow technology from the
> general one). 
> 
> IMHO,
> 
> Dan
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Daniel.Brickley at bristol.ac.uk                  
> Institute for Learning and Research Technology http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
> University of Bristol,  Bristol BS8 1TN, UK.   phone:+44(0)117-9287096
> 
> 
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