OASIS and RosettaNet Set Standards Alliance

“The only cautionary note is that it’s not clear how Web Services specs (such as SOAP, WSDL, and the UDDI as well as the security and reliability specs) fit in to the picture,” ZapThink Senior Analyst Ronald Schmelzer told internetnews.com. “It’s interesting to note, in addition, that the WS-I wasn’t involved in this standards convergence effort, which is their main purview as well.”

Read more at: internetnews.com

Recruiting WS-I Members from Vertical Industries

You joined the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) Organization to accelerate and encourage the adoption of Web services. WS-I plans to meet these goals by providing deliverables that assist in the interoperability of Web services implementations. For the WS-I to be successful in its mission, however, it is essential that it has broad industry representation within its membership. WS-I needs your help.

At this time, a vast majority of WS-I members are IT vendors. Whether you work for a vendor or not, it’s in your company’s best interest to expand the WS-I membership, expecially among industry members outside the IT community. This white paper is an important tool to help you in this important activity.

This paper seeks to explain why current WS-I members should recruit additional industry members, why industry members should join the WS-I, and what actions WS-I members should take to recruit new members. It should be a starting point for ideas about how you can help the WS-I grow and become more effective in achieving its goals.

Service-Oriented Process

Business processes have always been an important, if understated, asset of enterprises. The nature and methods by which a company runs its business changes on a daily basis at various different levels in the company — from high-level strategic changes to lower-level implementation details. As a result of these changes, enterprises constantly struggle to make their businesses more responsive to business changes by connecting their business requirements to their IT and human capabilities.

However, automating business processes has historically been a difficult-to-achieve goal for most enterprises due to the flexibility of their IT infrastructure. Fortunately, businesses have a solution in Service-Oriented Process: a separate abstraction layer for business process definition and execution that leverages the capabilities of Service-oriented Architectures. Service-Oriented Process provides businesses an approach to tying business requirements to the Service model represented in the SOA metamodel, thereby providing a flexible approach towards implementing architectures that promote business agility.

“When Will XML’s Time Come?”

In financial services, the picture is murkier. Plenty of financial service providers have implemented XML. But too many companies are trying to be the first to gain a competitive advantage with XML-based systems, and then force their own standards on their partners. The result: confusion, acrimony and duplication of effort, says Ron Schmelzer, founder and senior analyst with XML market researcher ZapThink LLC.

Read more at: CIO Insight

E-Business and XML: Where Metadata Makes Money

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ZapNote: The Open Applications Group, Inc. (OAGI)

The vision of the Open Applications Group, Inc. (OAGI) is to facilitate Business-to-Business (B2B) and Application-to-Application (A2A) integration by introducing a set of Business Object Documents (BODs) that specify integration requirements to the point that systems can be "plug and play" in the same manner that desktop systems now can support arbitrary hardware devices. OAGI initiatives play well with ebXML and RosettaNet efforts and can be used as a quick step-up towards B2B integration.

ZapNote: RosettaNet

RosettaNet has long been a leading force in standardization of e-Business exchange in the high-tech supply chain. One of the most significant challenges facing XML-based B2B standards is their difficulty in being widely implemented and adopted. To directly address this implementation and usability challenge, RosettaNet has adopted a new focus aimed at enabling global implementation of their specifications. Users looking to implement RosettaNet specifications should read this Briefing Note to understand this new focus and ascertain how it will affect their long-term implementation goals.

ZapNote: Infoteria

Infoteria’s Asteria Platform and Business Language Objects for XML (BLOX) provide a comprehensive solution for transporting, integrating, and manipulating XML within the context of e-Business transactions, with a particular focus on the RosettaNet specifications. Their comprehensive B2B automation and integration platform, along with componentized business functionality, will help to simplify and enable scalable and robust B2B integration applications.

The XML Standards Landscape

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