There is ANSI (American National Standards Institute), there is ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation), the United Nations. Things like OASIS and the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and WS-I (Web Services Interoperability Organisation) are not standards organisations. They create specifications that occasionally have some amount of consensus. But it is the marketing term to call things standard these days.
So what's an actual standards organisation?
Well, a standards organisation is something that is chartered to be a standards body that has some standard procedures…To me, a standard, in the best case, is some kind of specification which is developed by consensus of all the serious players and for stakeholders of some domain. (Standards development) has some open process and (the standards) are freely available and implementable. And there are not very many bodies that meet that definition.
How did you get involved with the United Nations? They were trying to figure out how to do this kind of XML EDI (electronic data interchange) stuff, and I recommended that they work with OASIS...We talked for several months and the ebXML initiative was kicked up by the end of 1999.
Now looking back... the key issue for us was that this was something of an arranged marriage, kind of a cross-cultural arranged marriage... CEFACT wanted a way to make (EDI) relevant in the age of the Internet and Web... (and) to be able to bring the benefits of EDI and automated business to smaller businesses primarily in developing countries. That was part of the overall mandate of CEFACT.
The XML people were saying, "we are a bunch of vendors, smaller XML companies. And it will be great if we can have some more international clout -- maybe working with the standards body will give us that." So we sort of saw in each other a kind of ideal partner for what we did have. Mainly, they did not have expertise, and we did not have credibility. So that let us work together... It was one of the most heady times in my career.
This is around the same time that other XML technologies, notably Web services specifications like SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol, an XML-based communication protocol), were getting off the ground with Microsoft and IBM. What happened then?
We really tried to get every significant player involved. Microsoft, which is a member of OASIS, had not joined ebXML. And at that time, we did not know why. It turned out that they were doing SOAP and stuff in the background.
