OASIS Open

OASIS Unstructured Operation Markup Language eXtended (UOML-X) Technical Committee

The purpose of this TC is to carry on the existing OASIS UOML TC's goal of developing and maintaining the XML-based operation interface standard for unstructured documents. The Unstructured Operation Markup Language specification will define an XML schema for universal document operations. The schema is suitable for operating printable documents, including create, view, modify, and query information, that can be printed on paper, e.g. books, magazine, newspaper, office documents, maps, drawings, blueprints, but is not restricted to these kinds of documents. There are several commercial and free applications available based on the current draft of UOML cited below, with more currently under development.

The resulting specification must meet the following requirements:

• It must be suitable for printable documents.
• It must define universal operations to these documents, including create, view, modify, query, retrieve, security control, user interaction etc.
• It must be compatible with the W3C Extensible Markup Language (XML) v1.0 and W3C Namespaces in XML v1.0 specifications.
• It must process layout-based information suitable for presenting the document.
• It must be friendly to document related applications.
• It must be cross-platform and program language independent.

The existing UOML specification part 1 developed by UOML TC meets the above criteria. It is anticipated that it will be contributed to the TC as a starting point for its work. A standard for document operation will be of great utility to many users and software companies developing applications, and should be made available as soon as possible.

The UOML specification will be composed of several parts. The first part describes operations that should be used to create, read, write, edit, display/print documents. The other parts describe operations for security control (including DRM), query, document organizing etc., and such other document-related functions as the TC may decide to specify.

The work of this TC has been divided into two phases:

In the first phase, the TC will review the existing UOML Specification Part 1 developed by UOML TC, and submit to public review by the end of Q2 of 2008.

The TC will plan to submit the UOML Specification Part 1 for approval as an OASIS Standard in 2008. In the meantime, we can start the second phase.

In the second phase, this TC will develop other functions in additional parts of the UOML specification, to encompass additional areas of applications or users, and maintain the existing part(s) which may also include adapting the specification to recent developments. The work of this TC in the second phase will additionally allow for the following areas:

• enabling additional areas of application,
• exploring new or experimental ideas for document operation, and
• extending the expressiveness of the operation.

The TC also may choose to submit completed and approved work to other organizations in accordance with the OASIS Liaison Policy. Each of the drafts will include a set of XML schemas setting the vocabulary, constraints and semantics of each operation in question, and a set of written specifications that describe the elements and attributes of the schemas in plain English.

The anticipated audience for this work includes, but is not restricted to:

• Developers of document related applications;
• Developers of DoCbase Management System(DCMS); and
• Other specification writers that need document operations or parts of it.

The TC shall conduct its proceedings in English.

The TC will operate under the RF on RAND Mode under the OASIS IPR Policy.