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"I Think We Need to Define This Relationship"
By Editorial Staff 

BOSTON
December 18, 2001

The OASIS Customer Information Quality (CIQ)) 
Technical Committee announced that it has accepted the submission 
of CRML, the XML vocabulary specification that defines customer 
relationships. Originally developed by MSI Business Solutions Pty. Ltd., 
CRML provides an open, application- and vendor-independent method for 
describing any type of customer relationship. The OASIS CIQ Technical 
Committee plans to adopt CRML into its family of customer information 
specifications including xCIL and xNAL, which define unique customer 
characteristics.

"Up until now, the OASIS CIQ Technical Committee has concentrated on 
defining standards to describe characteristics of a customer, such 
as name, address, phone number, email, etc. Now with CRML, we are 
able to describe relationships between customers from a business 
and personal point of view," said Ram Kumar of MSI, chair of the 
OASIS CIQ Technical Committee. "Because CRML uses xCIL and xNAL 
as the basis for its vocabulary, it provides the third and final 
specification needed to identify all aspects of customer information."

Under the CRML standard, a customer can be a person or an organization. 
CRML accommodates complex customer relationships including person-to-person, 
person-to-business, and business-to-business.


"The rapid adoption of e-business has created a new world of 
interoperability between organizations, systems, processes, 
platforms, tools and, most importantly, data," commented George 
Langley, director and founder of MSI Business Solutions Pty. Ltd., 
a sponsor member of OASIS. "To ensure reliability and success, it 
is necessary to define standards that enable interoperability of 
data before we even start to think about how other entities can 
interoperate. A standard way of defining customer relationships 
and customer information is essential for interoperability to occur. 
CRML is a major step towards achieving this, and we are confident 
that migrating its development to OASIS will result in the widest 
possible adoption of the standard."