Just 5 months after OASIS announced their collaboration with WS-I, and just after the recent announcement from WS-I that they are closing and moving their efforts to OASIS, a new Web Services Interoperability Member Section has been created and announced. As the new committee pages state:
The OASIS Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) Member Section advances Best Practices for selected groups of standards, across platforms, operating systems, and programming languages. WS-I comprises a diverse community of Web services leaders from a wide range of organizations. OASIS WS-I Technical Committees maintain Profiles and supporting Testing Tools for standards. The Profiles and Testing Tools are available for use by the community to aid in developing and deploying interoperable Web services.
The steering committee consists of participants from Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and others, all members and contributors to the original work from the WS-I. The governance rules for the committee are similar to other Member Sections within OASIS:
The WS-I Steering Committee consists of nine members, each serving a two-year term. For consistency of management, terms are staggered so that five seats expire one year and the other four expire the following year.
In line with the original announcement from OASIS on accepting the donated standards that talked about ...
As WS-I completes its transition to OASIS, we look forward not only to safeguarding their accomplishments but also to advancing their mission.
... the committee is set up for new deliverables as well as the donated originals.
It's obviously early days, with calls to join and advance the effort only just going out. However, it will be interesting to see how much activity occurs within this new Member Section and how far they advance the work begun by the WS-I. Other Member Sections, such as the OpenCSA, which has been working on standardizing the original SCA donations from the likes of IBM and Oracle, have been fairly successful in broadening their membership and applicability. Time will tell.
