XML.ORG

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In May 1999, OASIS signed up eight companies that were building the XML market to sponsor a new site devoted to the XML industry: XML.ORG (http://www.xml.org). The site is designed to be an independent, reliable source of information for people whose information must be compatible between two vendors' systems.

The XML.ORG Steering Committee and the OASIS Board of Directors have been working on building a viable industry portal, complete with a place to register and store schemas. They are also dealing with some of the industry's most challenging issues, such as a comprehensive intellectual property (IP) policy.

No U.S. case law currently deals with the IP rights of schema owners. OASIS is being advised by the country's leading IP counsel and will likely develop the industry's best IP policy in this area. OASIS believes that having such policies in place before launching the registry and repository itself is critical.

OASIS formed the Registry and Repository Technical Committee, which has been working on standardizing a way to register schemas at any site and then store and access them easily. This is important work, because the XML industry needs reliable places to store schemas if namespaces are to succeed. Once the working group finishes the spec, it will build a reference application to demonstrate how the spec could work.

Because the OASIS process assimilates inputs from across an industry, the work tends to be more complex than it is with small, vendor-led groups. Although the industry standardization process can take longer, the results are more likely to be accepted by members than results offered by a single vendor that might have proprietary interests in mind.