OASIS Pushes Communication Standard

OASIS, a not-for-profit consortium that seeks to drive the adoption of e-business standards, has established a new technical committee to form a reference model for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). In essence, an SOA is a collection of services that communicate with one another.

Under some scenarios, however, developers may have a diverging understanding of what makes up an SOA.

"The OASIS Service Oriented Architecture TC is chartered to develop a Reference Model for Service Oriented Architecture. This is primarily to address SOA being used as a term in an increasing number of contexts and specific technology implementations," read a statement on the OASIS Web site.

"Sometimes, the term is used with differing - or worse, conflicting - understandings of implicit terminology and components. This Reference Model is being developed to encourage the continued growth of different and specialized SOA implementations whilst preserving a common layer of understanding about what SOA is."

The group's secondary goal is to make certain that vendors have "consistent" logical divisions in architectures and products. In other words, many solutions may contain parts from many vendors. Also, in an example provided by OASIS, it would not be possible to build a car with a wheel that contains an axle or half a seat.

OASIS is the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards.