Anyway

Now that the XML Cata­log spe­cific­a­tion has been approved as an OASIS Stand­ard, it feels like the end of an era to me. I’ve been chair­ing the Entity Res­ol­u­tion Tech­nic­al Com­mit­tee since its incep­tion way back in Octo­ber 2000 , work­ing with a good group of people. As Norm put it today, we’d be happy to work on any stand­ard with this group. Every­one work­ing togeth­er, no pos­tur­ing, no weird agen­das, just people try­ing to find the best solu­tion to a prob­lem. It made the group easy to chair, and I’m con­fid­ent the res­ults reflect that; I can­’t help but sus­pect that dys­func­tion­al com­mit­tee polit­ics res­ults in spe­cific­a­tions that are not as good as they could have been.

So I’m a little nos­tal­gic right now, remem­ber­ing the first dis­cus­sions, the meet­ings at con­fer­ences, as well as the break we took in the middle before decid­ing to go for that “OASIS Stand­ard” monik­er. The TC still has 3 of the ori­gin­al 4 co-pro­posers (Norm Walsh, Paul Grosso, and me; John Cow­an had to pull out part-way through due to work oblig­a­tions). New people joined, and oth­ers left, but over­all we had a pretty stable group. 

So I want to thank the mem­bers of the ER TC, both past and present, and also Mary McRae and Robin Cov­er of OASIS. Your good humour, desire to do the right thing, and will­ing­ness to put in the effort all meant a lot and made it pos­sible to final­ize the spe­cific­a­tion and show mem­bers of OASIS why it’s use­ful. I’d also like to thank the imple­ment­ors of the cata­log spec who proved that it’s imple­ment­able! I believe cata­logs will be widely used in the future, even if, like much XML plumb­ing, people won’t actu­ally see a cata­log very often. 

So feel free to drop by the Sun booth at XML 2005 to talk about cata­logs; either Norm or I are likely to be there and Norm will have his cata­log imple­ment­a­tion on his laptop to show people (along with a bunch of oth­er things, of course).