OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) on Wednesday formed a technical committee to develop a specification for XML message interfaces that will support the coordination and processing of Web services from different organisations.
Dubbed the OASIS Business Transactions Technical Committee, the group initially plans to base its work on the Business Transaction Protocol (BTP) specification, submitted to the consortium by US-based BEA Systems.
"The protocol is responsible for managing the lifecycle of a transaction," said Rocky Stewart, CTO of BEA and chairman of the OASIS committee.
BTP, for instance, allows complex XML message exchanges to be tracked and managed as loosely coupled "conversations" between businesses, according to a statement.
Boston-based OASIS said the goal is to develop a protocol that works with existing business messaging standards, specifically ebXML (electronic business XML) and RosettaNet.
Stewart said OASIS also plans to extend support to BizTalk, Microsoft's data integration server.
Stewart added that the goals for XAML and BTP overlap. XAML is Transaction Authority Markup Language, an emerging standard for coordinating and processing multiparty transactions led by Bowstreet, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, and Sun.
"They [the group of vendors working on XAML] didn't have their spec written yet, and we have a product already, so we decided we'd turn it over to the a standards body," Stewart added.
Within OASIS, BEA will have a voting seat in the BTP development process. Other members include Sun Microsystems, Bowstreet and Interwoven.
