Alliances forged on Web services standards

The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) on Tuesday will add standards organizations such as the OMG (Object Management Group) and OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) to its ranks.

These organizations, along with the Open Applications Group and the Petrotechnical OpenStandards Consortium, will join WS-I as associate members, a newly established membership category for standards organizations, to improve their ability to communicate with WS-I on standards development.

WS-I features companies such as BEA Systems, IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems and is developing profiles for utilizing Web services integration technology. The company recently released its Basic Profile 1.0 document.

By becoming associate members, the standards groups receive benefits such as early access to WS-I documents.

"We're cooperating in terms of sharing information and giving them access to information that previously was not available to them until we made it available to the public," said Ed Cobb, chairman of the WS-I liaison committee and a member of the organization's board of directors. Cobb also is vice president of architecture and standards at BEA. 

WS-I also extended a membership invitation to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), but W3C chose not to join at this time, WS-I said. W3C could not be reached for comment on Monday afternoon.

WS-I currently is working on updates to its Basic Profile related to security and SOAP with Attachments technology, for handling multimedia items in Web services.