The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) is a global consortium that drives the development of e-business and web service standards.
Members of the consortium decide how and what work is undertaken through an open, democratic process.
Technical work is happening it the following categories, Web Services, e-Commerce, Security, Law & Government, Supply Chain, Computing Management, Application Focus, Document-Centric, XML Processing, Conformance/Interop and Industry Domains.
Specific Standards Under Development by OASIS Technical Commitees
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XRI - eXtensible Resource Identifier, a URI-compatible scheme and resolution protocol for abstract identifiers used to identify and share resources across domains and applications.
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XDI - XRI Data Interchange, a standard for sharing, linking, and synchronizing data ("dataweb") across multiple domains and applications using XML documents, eXtensible Resource Identifiers (XRIs), and new method of distributed data control called a link contract.
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OpenDocument (OASIS Open Office XML file format) is an open document file format for saving office documents such as spreadsheets, memos, charts, and presentations.
Patent disclosure controversy
Like many bodies producing open standards, OASIS has a patent disclosure policy requiring participants to disclose intent to apply for software patents for technologies under consideration in the standard. While the W3C requires participants to offer royalty-free licenses to anyone using the resulting standard, OASIS asks only for reasonable and non-discriminatory [1] licensing.
Controversially, this licensing allows publication of standards requiring licensing fee payments to patent holders, effectively eliminating the possibility of open source implementations. Further, contributors could initially offer royalty-free use of their patent, later imposing per-unit fees, after the standard becomes accepted.
Supporters of OASIS point out this could occur anyway since an agreement would not be binding on non-participants, discouraging contributions from potential participants. Supporters further argue that IBM and Microsoft shifting standardization efforts from the W3C to OASIS is evidence this is already occurring.
See Also: World Wide Web Consortium
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