A symposium sponsored by OASIS members Adobe, Booz Allen Hamilton, IBM, SAP, and Sun Microsystems will be held April 26-27, 2004, in New Orleans, LA, USA, coinciding with the popular New Orleans Jazz Festival.

Hosted by OASIS, the Symposium on Reliable Infrastructures for XML is open to the public, offering a forum for the international community to exchange ideas and present results of standards work-in-progress. Symposium events will address the different and only partially interchangeable technologies that propose to increase the reliability of XML-based messaging and networking infrastructure. Interoperability issues of concern relate to several technologies: reliable messaging specifications, transaction protocols, intermediate levels of routing, and point-to-point compared to end-to-end, and message-oriented middleware as a carrier for XML messages.

At least seventeen (17) of the OASIS Technical Committees will be participating in two days of face-to-face working sessions. These include: FWSI TC, Legal XML Legislative TC, Legal XML Electronic Court Filing TC, Legal XML Integrated Justice TC, Legal XML SDHI TC, WS-CAF TC, WS-Notification TC, WSRF TC, WSRM TC, XACML TC, XDI TC, ebSOA TC, ebXML BP TC, ebXML CPPA TC, ebXML IIC TC, ebXML Messaging TC, and the ebXML Registry TC.

Events include an OASIS Symposium BoF on "Advancing a Service-Oriented Architecture Based on ebXML and Web Services; the BoF leader is Duane Nickull of Adobe Systems, convener and proposed chair of the OASIS ebSOA Technical Committee.

OASIS and CommerceNet will join forces to present "Reliable Infrastructure for eHealth," a one-day Workshop designed to investigate the relationships between the standards that exist today and identify solutions to the road ahead. This workshop is designed to facilitate the identification of practical steps that can be taken to apply reliable infrastructure for XML standards into healthcare applications.

Reliable Infrastructures for XML Symposium Overview

The Symposium Program Committee is the OASIS Technical Advisory Board (TAB), incliding Karl Best, OASIS; Derek Coleman, HP; William Cox, BEA; Chet Ensign, LexisNexis; Chris Ferris, IBM; Eduardo Gutentag, Sun; Jackson He, Intel; Tim Moses, Entrust; Krishna Sankar, Cisco; Pete Wenzel, SeeBeyond.

Symposium Theme and Motivation:

"Many different (and partially interchangeable) technologies are proposed or available to increase the reliability of XML-based messaging and networking infrastructure. These include technologies applied:

• At the transport layer (e.g., reliable messaging specifications)
• At the application layer (e.g., transaction protocols)
• At intermediate levels (e.g., routing, point-to-point compared to end-to-end)
• By using Message-Oriented Middleware as a carrier for XML messages

We define "reliable" to mean that implementing one or more of these technologies in an infrastructure removes some of the burden of ensuring application integrity from software programmers and architects. The OASIS Symposium is focused on exploring the current state of these technologies and exploring areas where open standards are needed."

On Monday, 26 April 26, 2004 there will be an OASIS Symposium BoF on "Advancing a Service-Oriented Architecture Based on ebXML and Web Services." The BoF leader is Duane Nickull of Adobe Systems, convener and proposed chair of the OASIS ebSOA Technical Committee. When the ebXML architecture was first conceived, the term 'Web services' hadn't even been coined. Now, many of the ebXML layers have been reconciled to embrace core W3C technology, such as WSDL and SOAP. It is time for OASIS to articulate just how ebXML fits into the service-oriented architecture that today's users need. The intent of this BoF is to share information and insights on the implementability and interoperability of the multiple ebXML and Web Services specifications and identify gaps or future work needed for useful, complete implementations. We will discuss ways to map ebXML to the broader area of SOA and provide examples and best practices that will make the implementer's job easier.

On Wednesday, 28 April 28, 2004, OASIS and CommerceNet join forces to present Reliable Infrastructure for eHealth, a one-day Workshop designed to investigate the relationships between the standards that exist today and identify solutions to the road ahead. This workshop is designed to facilitate the identification of practical steps that can be taken to apply reliable infrastructure for XML standards into healthcare applications.

The OASIS Plenary and Annual General Meeting (AGM) will be held Tuesday, April 27, 2004 immediately following the Symposium. This once-a-year event provides a Members-Only opportunity to review and respond to a state-of-the-union address presented by the OASIS Board of Directors.

OASIS Technical Committees Meeting in New Orleans

1. Electronic Business Service Oriented Architecture TC (ebSOA)
2. ebXML Business Process TC (ebBP)
3. ebXML Collaboration Protocol Profile and Agreement TC (CPPA)
4. ebXML Implementation, Interoperability and Conformance TC (ebXML IIC)
5. ebXML Messaging Services TC (ebMS)
6. Framework for Web Services Implementation TC (FWSI)
7. LegalXML Electronic Court Filing TC
8. LegalXML Integrated Justice TC
9. LegalXML Legislative Documents, Citations, and Messaging TC
10. LegalXML Subscriber Data Handover Interface TC (SDHI)
11. ebXML Registry TC
12. Web Services Composite Application Framework TC (WS-CAF)
13. Web Services Notification TC (WSN)
14. Web Services Resource Framework TC (WSRF)
15. Web Services Reliable Messaging TC (WSRM)
16. Extensible Access Control Markup Language TC (XACML)
17. XRI Data Interchange TC (XDI)

From the Announcement

"Today, many different (and partially interchangeable) technologies are available that propose to increase the reliability of XML-based messaging and networking infrastructure. We define 'reliable' to mean that implementing one or more of these technologies in an infrastructure removes some of the burden of ensuring application integrity from software programmers and architects," explained Chet Ensign of LexisNexis, chair of the Program Committee of the OASIS Technical Advisory Board. "The OASIS Symposium will focus on exploring the current state of these technologies and identifying gaps where open standards are needed."

User requirements will drive the discussions. Keynotes will be provided by William Stangel, Sr. VP and Enterprise Architect for Fidelity Investments Systems Company, and Thomas Koulopoulos, president and co-founder of the Delphi Group.

Other program highlights include a user panel on "Implementing Standards to Achieve Reliable Transacting," featuring Fred Falten of General Motors representing the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG), Kenneth R. Hutcheson, director of the Chemical Industry Data Exchange (CIDX), Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS, and Paul Tearnen, Vice President, Standards Management of RosettaNet. Moderated by Michael Bechauf, Vice President of NetWeaver Standards for SAP, the panel will explore the importance of open standards to users and the ways industry groups are implementing standard-oriented architectures into their own work.

Building on foundational information presented in the main Symposium, the healthcare community will gather on Wednesday, 28 April for a workshop, "Reliable Infrastructures for eHealth." Implementers from Health Level Seven (HL7), The Mayo Clinic, Medical Banking Project, US Centre for Disease Control, US National Institute of Health, and others will investigate the relationships between the standards that exist today and paths for future development.

Seventeen OASIS Technical Committees will meet following the Symposium to advance standard data exchange for e-business, Web services, security, and legal applications. First meetings of the new OASIS Electronic Business Service Oriented Architecture (ebSOA) Technical Committee, the OASIS Web Services Notification (WSN) Technical Committee, and the OASIS Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) Technical Committee will be held at the event.