Digital Reach

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with those of their suppliers and customers are concerned with
how Internet software standards can help mitigate the risk of
adopting new technologies. Governments too are realizing the
limitations of a shortsighted approach to standardized vocabu-
laries, as they find themselves hampered by attempts to share
information between agencies and levels (federal, regional/state,
local) and by their need to interact with other countries and with
businesses covering a wide range of industry sectors. The chaotic
communications between public sector agencies in the USA
following the tragedy of hurricane ‘Katrina’ in 2005 demonstrated
how emergency management needed to integrate with public
safety, law enforcement, healthcare, environmental cleanup, and
other disaster response mechanisms – and how difficult this was
to achieve in one of the most advanced economies in the world.
Now, in the run-up to WSIS Tunis, governments, business
and civil society groups are increasingly calling for open tech-
nology standards. These are the digital equivalent of a common
gauge for railway tracks and are not the same thing as open
source software. Both proprietary and open source software can
run on the “tracks” laid down by open technology standards.
OASIS members look to WSIS to give new impetus to develop-
ing an open, global ICT ecosystem. This is vital if we are to
enable the less-advantaged countries, enterprises and other
groups to have confidence in the accessibility of digital
networks. Open standards are an essential part of the infra-
structure of an inclusive, global Information Society.
What could be the solutions?
International cooperation is absolutely necessary to arrive at a
common point of reference against which industry groups and
government agencies can map their standards vocabularies.
When XML became a recommendation of the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C) in 1998, organizations such as
CommerceNet started to evangelize the practical benefits of
using XML in business vocabularies and interface protocols.
However, industry groups rushed into developing their own
XML vocabularies, despite the efforts of visionaries in multilat-
eral organizations, especially the UN, who advocated for
cross-industry adoption of a common business language and
agreement on element naming design rules.
Since WSIS 2003, many XML vocabulary experts and indus-
try associations have worked on the creation of an open
standard using XML for a common business language. The
Universal Business Language (UBL) OASIS Standard and the
UBL Naming & Design Rules OASIS Standard, together with
the UN/CEFACT ebXML Core Components Technical
Specification provide a means for cross-referencing some of the
industry-specific, XML-based vocabularies.
Researchers are also looking to various combinations of web
services with semantic web and grid computing to come up with
ways to apply reasoning tools to achieve some level of adaptive
information that could be applied to solving some business
needs today. They are seeking ways to enable the automated
invocation of business functionality through message exchange,
which holds the promise of fast progress in this area. There are
an increasing number of web services using basic semantics that
are starting to appear. Many services, such as travel reservations,
book selling, stock monitoring, banking and reporting, which
today are generally used manually by human users, could, in
the near future, be mediated by computational entities.
For such interoperability to succeed, however, implementa-
tion will need to occur within the e-business frameworks that
companies and industry groups are building and should be
based on some common cross-industry functional elements.
Industry adoption of common implementation methodologies
and common naming and design rules will also help to reduce
cross-sectoral barriers.
An additional approach, based on lessons learned from past
mistakes, is beginning to emerge as a way to achieve both cross-
sectoral interoperability in e-business semantic frameworks and
reduce the time-to-market for development of open standards
to use across industries in their e-business frameworks and
semantic interactions.
At OASIS, we see another example emerging of how cross-
sectoral standards can be developed more quickly and with
greater industry adoption on a global scale. The model links
open standards development processes closer to university and
government-sponsored research efforts. Active involvement of
technology vendors, small and large, helps to identify
approaches that can be implemented in software solutions. With
industry associations and end-user businesses taking an active
role in setting requirements and priorities, even version 1 spec-
ifications are assured to be usable and readily embraced. With
governments collaborating in the process, the results are also
more likely to meet public policy requirements and see wide-
spread adoption, especially in many of the global markets where
international trade is vital.
To understand our best options for the future, we should try
to avoid the mistakes of the past. The lessons learned in the
development of XML-based industry-specific domain vocabu-
laries help to chart a path forward for the application of web
services standards in the creation of service-oriented architec-
tures for various industries. This path is built upon common
web services standards that are applied in a comprehensive
fashion, using a set of common web service elements that imple-
ment common methodologies.
OASIS and its partners, such as UN/CEFACT at the inter-
governmental level, hope to work in the context of the follow-up
and implementation of the WSIS to construct an open stan-
dards environment. Common standards will help to ensure that
all participants in e-business, whether large or small, in public
or private sectors, can interpret information in a uniform way
and communicate without technical barriers. Open, interna-
tional standards are an important part of any effective strategy
to bridge the so-called digital divide and enable less-advantaged
countries to compete in the global economy and Information
Society.
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Examples of OASIS standards being endorsed by governments
Emergency Management Common Alerting Protocol (CAP)
ebXML Messaging
ebXML Collaborative Partner Profile Agreement (CPPA)
ebXML Registry/Repository
OpenDocument Format for Office Applications
Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)
Universal Business Language (UBL)
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