OASIS Customer Information Quality (CIQ) TC
Delivering royalty free, open, international, industry and application neutral XML specifications for representing, interoperating, and managing Party (Person/Organisation) Centric Information (Name, Address, Party Profile and Party Relationships)
Completed:
The Technical Committee was closed by TC Administration on 14 April 2016 and is no longer active.
The CIQ TC specifications has been widely adopted in commercial and governmental applications and has been incorporated into other standards as well. See below for more details.
Archives of its work remain publicly accessible and are linked from this page. OASIS appreciates the efforts of all those who participated in this TC.
Note
On 03 December 2018, TC Admin published Customer Information Quality Specifications Version 3.0 Name (xNL), Address (xAL), Name and Address (xNAL) and Party (xPIL) Committee Specification 02 and added the schemas for Customer Information Quality Party Relationships (xPRL) Specification Version 3.0 CS01.
Both actions had been properly approved by the Technical Committee but never carried out.
More detail can be found in the README files included in http://docs.oasis-open.org/ciq/v3.0/cs02/ and in Table of Contents
- Announcements
- Overview
- Technical Work Produced by the Committee
- Download Specifications
- Expository Work Produced by the Committee
- Adoption of Specifications by Industry Type
- Implementation of Specifications by Application Type
- External Resources
- Mailing Lists and Comments
September 16, 2013:
The Specifications have been stable since it was released and unless there are any issues identified by the public, there is no intention of releasing any new version. Please send the committee any issues you might have with the specifications. Thank you.
December 06, 2010 - CIQ TC presentation to ISO TC 211/19160:
The TC presented to the ISO TC 211/19160 project team on 6 Dec in Canberra, Australia about its work. ISO TC 211 is working to establish a structured set of standards in the field of digital geographic information.
October 2010 - Master's Thesis using OASIS CIQ Standards:
Zahhar Kirillov of the Tallinn University Institute of Informatics has done a Master's thesis using OASIS CIQ standards after having compared other standards such as vCard and FOAF.
10 November 2009:
OASIS CIQ xPRL V3.0 (extensible Party Relationships Language) has been approved by the TC as a Committee Specification. The specification can be downloaded from the download section.
04 June 2009:
IMPORTANT: OASIS CIQ V3.0 Committee Specification CS02(Released in November 2008) has two MINOR BUGS in two XML Schemas (xPIL.xsd and xPIL-types.xsd). The document below lists the bugs and provides guidance to users on how to fix them.
OASIS CIQ V3.0 Committee Specification CS02 Bugs Document
01 November 2008:
OASIS CIQ V3.0 Committee Specification 02 (xNL-Party Name, xAL-Party Address, xPIL-Party Information) has been approved by the TC. This is the final release. This package contains fixes to OASIS CIQ V3.0 Committee Specs. released in Nov.2007. Go to Download section to download the specification package.
June 2010:
CityML uses OASIS CIQ Specs as part of its KML. CityML is now an "Open Geospatial Consortium" standard.
June 2009:
Google Maps uses OASIS CIQ Specs as part of its KML. KML is now an "Open Geospatial Consortium" standard.
The Name "Customer Information Quality" is just the operating name of the Technical Committee. The scope of the TC is much broader than "Customer Information". This Committee concentrates on developing global and generic industry standards for managing "Party Centric Information". "Customer" is a type of "Party".
The word "Customer" is used as a generic term and it can be replaced by line of business specific or industry terms (specific to the context) such as: Beneficiary, Business Entity, Citizen, Client, Contact, Guest, Legal Entity, Organisation, Partner, Party, Patient, Prospect, Subscriber, Supplier, Service Provider, Trust, Trustee, etc. All these types of "customer(s)" are a type of "Party".
The objective of the OASIS CIQ TC (formed in 2000) is to deliver a set of XML Specifications for defining, representing, interoperating and managing "PARTY (Person or Organisation) CENTRIC INFORMATION" that are truly open, vendor neutral, industry and application independent, and importantly "Global" (ability to represent international data formats such as different types of party names and addresses used in 241+ countries).
This is the only group in the world that is dedicated to developing Party Information Specifications that are vendor, application, industry and technology neutral, and importantly, open and global.
The CIQ family of specifications are designed to represent party data (e.g. name and address) independent of any culture, geographical location, application or industry at an abstract (simple representation of data - free text format) or detailed (complex representation, i.e. breaking the data into its atomic elements - structured format) level from a data integrity and quality perspective and therefore, is truly a "global" (International) specification for representing party information.
CIQ Specifications enables organisations to have a unified and consistent representation and standardization of their party data (e.g. employee, members, suppliers, partners, customers, etc) and use it to support various application requirements in the organisation that deal with party data (e.g. Master Data Management (MDM), Customer/Party Data Integration, Party identification/recognition/identity management, HR, billing, sales, marketing, data quality and integrity, e-commerce/e-business, party data exchange, postal services, customer/party views, etc). By representing and managing party data consistently using CIQ specifications as the base scheme for an organisation, and extending it to support specific business requirements, unique identitification, integration, standardisation, matching, synchonization and management of quality party information/data is possible.
OASIS CIQ Specifications play a critical role in enabling party oriented software services based on SOA principles to exchange, interoperate and integrate party data in a consistent, standard and open manner between IT systems/applications and processes. It enables "loose coupling of party data" (the business payload) in conjunction with loose coupling of the software services infrastructure (web services-WSDL and other standards).
The figure below shows some of the key use of party centric data in industry and CIQ Specifications help support these variety of applications and industry domains.
The CIQ TC develops XML industry specifications for the following Party entities. Party entities are defined as modular and reusable components (e.g. Party Name only, Party Address only) in the form of XML Schema (for each component).Users can choose the component to implement:
NAME
Name of a Party (person or an organisation).
OASIS CIQ specification that provides a standard format to represent the name of a party is "extensible Name Language (xNL)".
ADDRESS
A physical location or a mail delivery point.
OASIS CIQ specification that provides a standard format to represent an address/location is "extensible Address Language (xAL)".
PARTY
A Party could be of two types namely,
An Organisation could be a company, association, club, not-for-profit, private firm, public firm, consortium, university, school, etc.
Party centric data consists of many attributes (e.g. Name, Address, email address, telephone, qualifications, occupation, identification details, etc) that are unique to a party. A Customer is of type Party.
OASIS CIQ specification that provides a standard format to represent party centric data is "extensible Party Information Language (xPIL)".
PARTY RELATIONSHIPS
Pairwise affiliation or association between two people, between two organisations, or between an organisation and a person
OASIS CIQ specification that provides a standard format to represent relationships between two or more parties including the roles of the parties involved in the relationship, is "extensible Party Relationships Language (xPRL)".
xPRL supports chains of interlocking pairwise party relationships, linked by common members.CIQ Specifications are open (free to download and use and free from IPRs, Patents, Licenses, and Royalties).
For FAQ about CIQ TC and its work, see the FAQ SectionTechnical Work Produced by the Committee
Approved Committee Specifications v3.0 (As of November 2009):
- CIQ V3.0 XML Schemas that use XML Schema Enumerations (Code Lists) as XML Schemas
- CIQ V3.0 XML Schemas that use Genericode based Code Lists as XML Schemas
- Examples of xNL, xAL, xNAL and xPIL as XML Documents
- Utilities to create and execute business rules outside of the CIQ XML Schemas that help to customize XML Schemas to meet specific requirements without modifying the XML Schemas or breaking conformance to the specifications. - Utilities to perform validation (one and two pass) against XML Documents and XML Schemas
- HTML Documentation of the two CIQ V3.0 XML Schema Sets
- CIQ V3.0 Name, Address and Party Specifications - Document
- Information about the fixes done to CIQ V3.0 (November 2007 release)
- Instructions about how to install this package to the existing installation of CIQ V3.0 (November 2007 release)
- CIQ V3.0 Release Notes - Document
- CIQ V3.0 Package Overview - Document
- Introduction to CIQ TC - Document
- CIQ TC FAQ - Document
- CIQ V3.0 Technical Overview Document
Adoption of Specifications by Industry Type
CIQ TC specifications have been widely adopted by different groups around the world (the committee does not track its use as there is no registration process to download the specification and so it is hard to know) and some of the key types of groups are as follows:
Google Maps uses OASIS CIQ Specification ast part of its KML. KML and CityGML languages uses OASIS CIQ specifications and both these languages are now "Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)" Standards.
Implementation of Specifications by Application Type
Following are a selection of some of the key broad categories of applications that have implemented CIQ TC Specifications:
Although not produced by the OASIS CIQ TC, the following information offers useful insights into its work.
- Comparing FOAF, vCard and OASIS CIQ Standards - Master's Thesis Work
- ISO Focus Journal
- Person/Organization Schema - Why re-invent the Wheel?
- XML Standards for Global Customer Information Management-DM Review
- OASIS Press Release on CIQ Mailing List Formation, 27 March 2000
- The Importance of Information Asset Governance-XML Journal
- OASIS Press Release on CIQ TC Formation, 11 Oct.2000
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ciq-comment: a public mail list for providing input to the OASIS CIQ Technical Committee members. Send a comment or view archives.
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