Collaboration, Communication and Convergence Bring Industry Groups Together for First Interoperability Summit.

Business Editors & High Tech Writers

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 20, 2001

Major standards groups and consortia from around the world will collaborate at the Interoperability Summit in Orlando, Florida, 6-7 December 2001. HR-XML, OASIS, OMG (TM), UN/CEFACT and XBRL.org will host the Interoperability Summit as the first in a series of meetings aimed at identifying common ground and coordinating development of electronic business specifications.

"This is not simply another meeting opportunity," explained Ray Walker Chair of UN/CEFACT's Steering Group -- the United Nations body for trade facilitation and electronic business -- and a member of the Management Group that coordinates, through an MoU, the activities of the four global dejure standards organizations in e-Business (ISO, IEC, ITU and UNECE). "The Interoperability Summit Series will begin to identify concrete intersections between major horizontal and vertical standards in order to promote acceptance of common models and approaches. The MoU members look forward to reviewing the outcome of Orlando and to working more closely together with the consortia in the future."

Registration for the Interoperability Summit currently includes attendees from Asia, Europe and North America, with representatives from industry groups, ACORD, AIIM, Air Transport Association, ANSI, HR-XML, IDEAlliance, IMS Global Learning Consortium, Interoperability Clearinghouse, OASIS, OMG, Open Applications Group, The Open Group, UN/CEFACT and XBRL.org. In addition, government agencies such as the United Kingdom Office of the e-Envoy and the United States Department of Defense, and global corporations, Fujitsu, IBM, Intel, Nokia, Oracle, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Reuters, Rockwell, Sun Microsystems, and others will contribute their perspectives to the Summit. Registration remains open at http://www.omg.org/interop/.

"The response has been overwhelming," said Dr. Richard Soley, chairman and chief executive officer of the OMG. "As standards groups proliferate, everyone recognizes the waste and confusion caused by duplication of efforts. The Interoperability Summit will identify intersections between major horizontal and vertical standards in order to promote acceptance of common models and approaches."

One item on the agenda will be the creation of a Standards Metadata Registry, where common metadata can be stored for standards efforts, promoting interoperability of specifications across different consortia.

"A Standards Metadata Registry will allow groups to publicize their specifications and discover what other organizations are doing," explained Karl Best, director of technical operations for OASIS. "This will lead to better communication between the various standards bodies, resulting in less overlap of efforts and interoperability of completed work."

The first day of the December summit will be devoted to targeting obstacles and opportunities, driving XML-based standards convergence and facilitating interoperability strategies amongst all the attendees. The second day will focus on Human Resources specifications that cross many industry sectors.

"HR issues like competencies and personal identifiers are fundamental to most business processes," said Chuck Allen, director of HR-XML Consortium. "We look forward to the opportunity to share what we're doing and explore how related work by other standards groups can fit."

The outcome of the first Interoperability Summit will be presented in a special session at the XML 2001 conference in Orlando on Tuesday, 11 December 2001.

"HR is the first modeling topic we've targeted. Future Interoperability Summits will address other wide-reaching, horizontal business functions," noted Louis Matherne, co-chair of the XBRL.org steering committee. "We're already planning a Summit focused on Procurement for early 2002."

About HR-XML

HR-XML (http://www.hr-xml.org) is a global, independent, non-profit consortium dedicated to enabling e-commerce and inter-company exchange of human resources (HR) data worldwide. The work of the Consortium centers on the development and promotion of standardized XML vocabularies for HR. HR-XML's current efforts are focused on standards for staffing and recruiting, compensation and benefits, training and work force management. HR-XML is represented by its membership in 17 countries.

About OASIS

OASIS (http://www.oasis-open.org) is the international, not-for-profit consortium that advances electronic business by promoting open, collaborative development of interoperability specifications. With the United Nations, OASIS sponsors ebXML, a global framework for electronic business data exchange. OASIS operates XML.ORG, the non-commercial portal that delivers information on the use of XML in industry. The XML.ORG Registry provides an open community clearinghouse for distributing and locating XML application schemas, vocabularies and related documents. OASIS serves as the home for industry groups interested in developing XML specifications. OASIS technical work embraces conformance, security, business transactions, repositories and other interoperability issues.

About OMG

With well-established standards covering software from design, through development, to deployment and maintenance, the Object Management Group (OMG) supports a full-lifecycle approach to enterprise integration. Based on the established Object Management Architecture (OMA) and emerging Model Driven Architecture (MDA), OMG's standards cover application design and implementation. OMG's Modeling standards include the UML (Unified Modeling Language) and CWM (Common Warehouse Metamodel). CORBA, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture, is OMG's standard open platform. OMG also issues the CORBAservices and a rapidly growing set of industry-specific standards in vertical markets including healthcare, telecommunications, biotechnology, transportation and a dozen other areas. The OMG is headquartered in Needham, MA, USA, with an office in Tokyo, Japan as well as international marketing offices in the UK and Germany, along with a U.S. government representative in Washington, DC.

About UN/CEFACT

UN/CEFACT (www.uncefact.org) is the United Nations body whose mandate covers worldwide policy and technical development in the area of trade facilitation and electronic business. Headquartered in Geneva, it has developed and promoted many tools for the facilitation of global business processes including UN/EDIFACT, the international EDI standard. Its current work programme includes such topics as Simpl-edi and Object Oriented EDI and it strongly supports the development and implementation of open, interoperable global standards and specifications for electronic business.

About XBRL.org

XBRL.org (www.xbrl.org) is an international group developing the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL), an XML-based framework for the preparation and exchange of business reports and data. The initial goal of XBRL is to provide an XML-based framework that the global business information supply chain will use to create, exchange, and analyze financial reporting information including, but not limited to, regulatory filings such as annual and quarterly financial statements, general ledger information, and audit schedules.