Oasis News & Articles

We expect the CMIS OASIS Technical Committee is feeling pretty good right now. Yesterday they voted CMIS specification draft 0.70b to be the official Committee Draft and approved it for submission to the OASIS public review process.

Now the fun part really begins.

Summer has come and gone and we still haven't seen a public review of the Content Management Interoperability Specification (CMIS). But while many of us have been impatiently waiting, it does appear that things have been happening.

Twitter is all a flutter with one individual tweet from enterprise content management vendor Nuxeo's Florent Guillaume (@efge):

#CMIS 0.70 soon official draft, and to be submitted for Public Review. Still on track for standardization near end of year!

With a public review of the Content Management Interoperability Specification (CMIS) (news, site) expected to be announced sometime soon, it's definitely time to check in and see what the various player have been up to.

Reminder: CMIS is an OASIS specification. It may well end up as a standard (and we hope that this happens), but it's not there yet. Here's where things stand today.

The majority of data on the web and elsewhere is unstructured, meaning that you cannot make assumptions that easily break the data down into components for processing. So what do you do when you need to process such information?

OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (news, site), has approved Version 1.0 of the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA), which allows some level of structure to be assigned to the documents, email, speech, images and video produced during human communication.

The OASIS CMIS Technical Committee just wrapped up their first face to face meeting at Redmond yesterday. Was it a good session? Has the scope changed? Did all those ECM guys get along? With some insight from Alfresco CTO John Newton, we got an update and help him share that update with you.

After releasing the industry’s first CMIS specification draft implementation in its Alfresco Labs 3 in September, Alfresco pours more effort into Content Management Interoperability Services promotion and support. This time — by releasing Alfresco CMIS Developer Toolbox.

Are you tired of hearing of this draft CMIS thing yet? Content management software companies aren’t. No rest until everyone comes up with something CMIS-compliant. Most recently, EMC released an updated CMIS-compliant version of its Documentum ECM platform.

CMIS is still in the draft, pre-born stage, but everyone wants a piece of it. Reminds us of the SharePoint saga, only MOSS is already bearing lotsa $$$ behind it.

In CMIS case, it’s all about interoperability and inter-CMS-ial, inter-repositorial camaraderie. Kind of like an Enterprise CMS socialism.

It has been a little less than two months since the news of a proposed new enterprise content management standard hit the streets. The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) spec, created jointly by Microsoft, IBM, EMC and a few other Enterprise CMS providers, was the talk of the town — for better or for worse.

But it’s been relatively quiet these days and we find that strange considering the importance of a standard like this to the industry. Maybe it’s not so important. Maybe it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Maybe it’s simply a done deal and no one needs to say more…

It doesn’t come as a surprise that three of the major Enterprise Content Management (ECM) providers — EMC, IBM and Microsoft — have been secretly developing a technical Enterprise CMS specification. Their super secret project is called the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. A fancy new acronym it is, but beyond this is it really the beginning of a brave new world for content management interoperability?

In January 2005, Massachusetts became the first state to throw down the gauntlet in terms of moving all public documentation to a non-proprietary format. The justification being, that it shouldn’t be necessary to purchase proprietary software to use digital public documentation.

Not only does it hold the constituents hostage in their need for a tool to read the proprietary format, but it also holds the government hostage in that the initiative to change off of any proprietary format is colossal.

On April 15-18, the San Diego Marriott Mission Valley in CA will host the fourth annual OASIS Symposium. Entitled “eBusiness and Open Standards: Understanding the Facts, Fiction, and Future,” the Symposium will draw an eclectic crowd of thought leaders, industry professionals and giddy geeks in the open source community.

In more standards news the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) recently announced that their members have approved OpenDocument Format (ODF) for Office Applications version 1.1 as an official OASIS Standard.

OpenDocument is a royalty-free, XML-based file format that covers features required by text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents.

This newest update provides users with important accessibility enhancements, ensuring that the OpenDocument format takes care of addressing the particular needs of people with disabilities.

The OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture — known as DITA — Technical Committee has released version 1.1 of its draft specification for public review, an ideally useful period of user critique that will last until May 4th.

Used for authoring, producing and conveying information as discrete, typed topics, DITA gets a tune-up in v1.1 with architectural specs, a language specification, a set of DTD’s and equivalent schemas.

OASIS and W3C recently announced their joint partnership for WebCGM 2.0. This is a new industry standard for technical illustrations in e-documents.

Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM) is the ISO standard for tree-structured binary graphics typically used by industries like aviation, architecture, defense and transportation. However, the results of the effort between OASIS and W3C have still yet to cover some ground — the best use for CGM on the Web still remains a touch unclear.

If you ever wanted to create a catalog request, write a certificate of origin or issue a self-billed invoice, but were totally lost as to how to go about it, great news: you are saved.

These are just a few of the whopping 23 new document types available under UBL 2.0. OASIS, which last year played a major role in helping define international ECM standards, just approved v2.0 as an OASIS Standard, the highest level of ratification issued by the international standards consortium.