An ever increasing number of industry verticals, government agencies and supply-chain are engaged in major efforts to reformat and standardize their business documents and transactions, often using XML. Beyond the immediate benefits of better archiving, querying and processing content; is looming another one with far greater potential: the ability to interoperate with partners - small and large - in an automated collaboration processes.

Those advanced enough on this path are realizing that there is more to Interoperability than getting the right network connection between two servers. Interoperability is a concept that crosses all aspects of business conducted electronically: document design, message format and protocol, partner agreements and company procedures, IT governance, business processes and workflow.

Like other major streamlining forces that reorganized the enterprise in the 90s such as customer focus, value chains and global competition, e-Business and e-Government collaborations are bound to modify deeply the way companies and agencies operate. Interoperability has its logistics, its technologies and standards, its best practices, its governance, its testing centers, its certifications and pecking orders, even its morals (good guys don't break interoperability, and bad guys are promptly quarantined). Only when all of the above is well established and integrated, will interoperability become invisible and pervasive.

We invite you to join us at the OASIS Symposium to discuss the Meaning of Interoperability. The Symposium is where OASIS will bring together leading experts to share their understanding and experience on how to make e-Government and e-Business work better. We do hope you consider attending.

Regards,
Jacques Durand
Symposium Co-Chair

MEET THE PROGRAM COMMITTEE:

Martin Chapman, Ph.D., joined Oracle Corporation in 2002 where he holds the position of Consulting Member Technical Staff and focuses on Web Services standards activities. This role has involved him in a plethora of web service activities within W3C, OASIS, WS-I, and ISO. He currently chairs the W3C Web Services Choreography Working Group and the OASIS Web Services Composite Application Framework TC. Martin gained a Ph.D. in Distributed Computing from Oxford Polytechnic and Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK, in 1989. From 1989 to 1996 he worked at BT Laboratories, Martlesham Heath, UK, where his principal task was in applying distributed object technology to the telecommunications industry. He joined IONA Technologies in 1996 and served as their prime representative to the OMG. During that time he authored several CORBA specifications and was elected to be a member of the OMG Architecture Board.

James Bryce Clark, Director of Standards Development for OASIS, is responsible for managing the consortium's industry standards efforts. He is an e-commerce and information technology attorney who began his practice as a financing and corporate restructuring lawyer with Shearman & Sterling at 53 Wall Street in New York. He represented high technology companies in their banking, trade finance, acquisitions and securities transactions throughout the 1990's, and served two terms as chairman of the American Bar Association's business law subcommittee on electronic commerce. While a practicing attorney, he was a contributor to the original ebXML project (now ISO 15000), co-editor of its business process standards in 2001, and chairman of the ebXML Joint Coordinating Committee. Prior to joining OASIS, he was vice president and general counsel of a healthcare e-commerce company, and corporate partner in a Los Angeles law firm. He is a U.S. delegate to the e-commerce working group of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL), and an expert adviser on automated contracting and Internet law for the U.S. State Department. He is a frequent speaker and author in e-commerce and information security law as well as complex finance transactions. Jamie holds JD and BSc degrees from the University of Minnesota, and is based in Los Angeles.

William Cox, Ph.D., has developed enterprise product architectures for Bell Labs, Unix System Labs, Novell, and BEA, and has done related work in OASIS, ebXML, the Java Community Process, OMG, and the IEEE, often working at the boundaries between technology and business requirements. He was lead architect for Unix System V Release 4 and of follow-on highly scalable and secure Unix systems, service-oriented architectures and directory APIs for Novell, Web Services and XML messaging and transaction systems, and other enterprise software. He earned a Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Today Bill concentrates on Transaction technologies, Portal technologies, XML, Web Services, and Java expressions of those standards. He is a member of the OASIS Technical Advisory Board, and of the OASIS Web Services Remote Portal, Business Transaction, and eGovernment Technical Committees in addition to the TAB. He is a past member of the Java Community Process Executive Committee and the OMG Board. He is a co-author of the Business Transaction Processing Primer and of WS-Transaction and WS-Coordination, and has delivered numerous talks on web services, transactions, and Java technologies.

Jacques Durand Ph.D., (Symposium Co-Chair) director of Engineering and Standards at Fujitsu Software, evaluates and promotes XML-related and eBusiness standards, and advises on their use in the enterprise software products at Fujitsu. He has actively been involved in ebXML and Web Services as a member of the OASIS ebXML Messaging Services TC, chair of the OASIS ebXML Implementation, Interoperability and Conformance (IIC) TC, and co-editor of the OASIS WS-Reliability TC. He has an interest in conformance and testing technology, coordinating with OASIS an initiative to facilitate conformance and interoperability testing for OASIS standards. Jacques is actively involved in WS-I (Web Services Interoperability), of which Fujitsu is a co-founder, and chaired its Testing Tools working group. He is also member of the OMG Production Rules Representation BEIDTF. Jacques has more than 25 years of experience in various areas of software, ranging from R & D to commercial products. He holds a Ph.D. from Nancy Univ (France) in logic programming.

Frederick Hirsch chairs the Strategy Committee of the OASIS Board and also serves on its IPR and TC Process Committees. Mr. Hirsch is the Senior Architect at Nokia Mobile Phones, responsible for Web services security and related product and standardization strategies. He has extensive distributed systems and security experience, having worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories, BBN, OSF, and CertCo, as well as smaller companies. He is actively involved in security standards committees at the W3C, OASIS, and WS-I and also contributes to other efforts including the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) and the Liberty Alliance. He was a requirements co-editor for XKMS, is an editor for SAML 2.0, and is Nokia's WS-I voting contact.

Hal Lockhart (Symposium Co-Chair) is a Senior Principal Engineering Technologist in the CTO's Office of BEA Systems. He represents BEA in information security-related standards activities at various bodies including OASIS, WS-I, JCP, W3C, Liberty Alliance, OMG, and Open Group. He is the co-chair of the OASIS XACML TC and an active member of a number of the OASIS Web Services Security TC and the OASIS Security Services TC. In 2004 he represented OASIS to ITU-T in relation to SAML and XACML. He was the OASIS Coordinator for the April 2005 WSS Interop demonstration. He has frequently been an OASIS speaker at various public events, most recently at OASIS Open Standards Days in Moscow and Amsterdam. In his more than 30 years in the software industry, Mr. Lockhart has been an application developer, kernel engineer, systems architect, engineering manager, operations manager, consultant, author, Director of Security and standards representative. He has worked in development, operations, service delivery, marketing and sales, in large companies and small ones, and has consulted at many Fortune 500 companies.

Mike Mahan is a Principal Research Engineer for the Nokia Research Center's Software and Application Technologies Laboratory. In his seven years at Nokia, he has been responsible for designing and developing mobile distributed applications using XML technologies, beginning with the first WAP browser. In the past year, Mike has managed a set of Web Services projects that explore novel user interfaces, applications, architectures, and execution platforms for mobile services. Prior to Nokia, Mike designed and developed network management systems for GTE and was the Information Systems Manager for a large manufacturer. Mike has been active in the standards development community for several years including the W3C, WS-I, OASIS, and OMA (Open Mobile Alliance). Mike is the current chair of the W3C XMLP working group. He has degrees in Mathematics and Software Engineering.

Jishnu Mukerji, Ph.D., is a Senior Systems Architect in the Software Global Business Unit of HP. He has represented HP on various standards consortia in working groups including OASIS, OMG, DMTF, WSI, JCP, and others. Jishnu has an extensive experience in architecture management, liaison management, and creation of a cooperative atmosphere that is conducive to the production of successful standards in standards organizations, having served on the OMG Architecture Board, the DMTF Architecture WG, the WSI Liaison Subcommittee, etc. He currently represents HP in the OMG Architecture Board and in that capacity is the Editor of the Model Driven Architecture Guide. At HP he is a member of the Core Architecture Team that defines the Adaptive Management Architecture on which all of HP's Management Products are based. In this capacity he has been involved in providing architectural support for the OASIS WSDM TC-related activities and various WGs in DMTF. In previous positions, in Bell Laboratories and Novell, Jishnu has been involved in the architecture and implementation of diverse large distributed systems ranging from telecommunication call processing systems to distributed development environments to micro-kernel based operating systems (UNIX SVR4). He received his Ph.D. and MS in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and BS and MS in Physics from the Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences in Pilani, India.

Tim Stevens is a Senior Software Engineer for LexisNexis, where he works as technical lead for composition systems responsible for converting and delivering XML and SGML content both to LexisNexis' extensive online content archive as well as directly to customers via electronic products. At LexisNexis, Tim has worked to develop internal corporate standards for internationalization and software development. In addition to software engineering, Tim has been freelance writing in the digital lifestyle and software development arenas for over eight years, providing content for a number of outlets including the Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA) Newsletter, InformIT, and Yahoo!

Pete Wenzel is a Senior Architect for Standards and Product Strategy with eBusiness and Application Integration solution vendor Sun Microsystems. In his ten years at the company, he has been responsible for designing and developing significant portions of the SeeBeyond Business Integration Suite, applying his high-level vision as well as expertise in areas such as data communications and security. Pete has been active in the standards development community for several years, including more than a year as Chief Architect of standards consortium RosettaNet. He currently serves as a member of several OASIS Technical Committees which relate to Web Services, ebXML and security, and represents Sun Microsystems in W3C workgroups and several vertical standards organizations.