Press Release

Standards Community Prepares to Explore the Meaning of Interoperability at OASIS Symposium

Peter Quinn, Open Standards Advocate and Former CIO of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Will Keynote

Boston, MA, USA; 30 March 2006 — "The Meaning of Interoperability" will bring standards developers and users together at the annual OASIS Symposium in San Francisco, 9-12 May 2006. The program will feature three days of presentations where members and non-members of the international standards consortium will explore the factors that affect an organization’s ability to interoperate with partners in automated collaboration processes.

"There is more to interoperability than getting the right network connection between two servers," noted Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS. "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. The OASIS Symposium provides a face-to-face opportunity to examine practical aspects from others attendees’ experiences in making interoperability pervasive and invisible."

In the keynote address, Peter Quinn, former CIO of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, will offer one example of the journey to institutionalize open standards and the cultural, political and commercial impediments encountered on the road to "open." According to Quinn, "In too many instances, technology enterprises have been constructed using proprietary technologies, which has resulted in unnavigable chasms of information and siloed operations. The cost of any enterprise, today, demands open standards to insure access to all and a sustainable cost structure."

The program closes with a keynote by Randy Heffner, vice president at Forrester’s Application Development & Infrastructure Research Group. Heffner will use Forrester’s vision for the future of IT as a framework to outline standards requirements and address the question, "How much business interoperability do we really need?".

Presentations on OASIS work including the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), ebXML, Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) OASIS Standards will be featured, along with sessions on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web services, and other topics relevant to interoperability.

Related events include technical committee meetings, tutorials, training sessions, and the annual OASIS member meeting. Open to both members and non-members of OASIS, the Symposium is sponsored by BEA Systems, EDS, IBM, Intel, PTC, SAP, and Sun Microsystems. The program is coordinated by the OASIS Technical Advisory Board and chaired by Jacques Durand, Ph.D., of Fujitsu, and Hal Lockhart of BEA Systems.

Additional Information: OASIS Symposium:http://www.oasis-open.org/events/symposium_2006/

About OASIS: OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) is a not-for-profit, international consortium that drives the development, convergence, and adoption of e-business standards. Members themselves set the OASIS technical agenda, using a lightweight, open process expressly designed to promote industry consensus and unite disparate efforts. The consortium produces open standards for Web services, security, e-business, and standardization efforts in the public sector and for application-specific markets. Founded in 1993, OASIS has more than 5,000 participants representing over 600 organizations and individual members in 100 countries. Approved OASIS Standards include AVDL, CAP, DITA, DocBook, DSML, ebXML CPPA, ebXML Messaging, ebXML Registry, EML, OpenDocument, SAML, SPML, UBL, UDDI, WSDM, WS-Reliability, WSRP, WS-Security, XACML, XCBF, and XML Catalogs. http://www.oasis-open.org

Press contact: Carol Geyer Director of Communications, OASIS carol.geyer@oasis-open.org +1.978.667.5115 x209