A proposal has been submitted to OASIS for the creation of an XLIFF technical committee to "define a specification for an extensible localisation interchange format that will allow any software provider to produce a single interchange format that can be delivered to and understood by any localisation service provider. The format should be tool independent, standardised, and support the whole localisation process. It will comprehensively support common software data formats and be open enough to allow the development of tools compatible with an implementer's own proprietary data formats and company culture." The first phase of TC work will be based on work previously done by the Yahoo DataDefinition Group; this group has produced a white paper, a specification, and a DTD, which were made public through that group's site. The existing specification will be submitted for approval as the XLIFF 1.0 specification in the first meeting. The Technical Committee Proposal contains a statement of intellectual property rights and provisional list of deliverables.

The TC Chair initially is Tony Jewtushenko (Oracle). The eleven individuals proposing the OASIS TC include representatives from Oracle, Novell, Sun Microsystems, IBM/Lotus, RWS Group, Lionbridge, and Moravia, as well as two individual members (Enda McDonnell [Alchemy Software Development Ltd.] and Peter Reynolds [Berlitz GlobalNET].)

From the TC call for participation:

The current state of affairs in software localisation is that a software provider delivers their localisable resources to a localisation service provider in a number of disparate file formats. If the software provider has common industry standard file formats, this makes the task of interchanging files easier. However, when there are uncommon or nonstandard file formats either the software provider or the localisation service provider must provide a method for the file to be localised. For a software provider with many of these uncommon or nonstandard files, this requirement becomes a major hurdle when attempting to have their software localised.

The first phase is to create a working specification that will concentrate on the software UI file requirements. However, it should also include all of the building blocks required to ensure that we could implement the document elements at any time.