Committee To Develop Standards For Business Transaction Management

Compiled ByDeborah Austin A new business transactions technical committee -- formed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) -- aims to develop an eXtensible Markup Language (XML)-based protocol for long-running business-to-business (B2B) transactions on the Internet. Initial committee members: technology-services firm Sun Microsystems Inc., Palo Alto, Calif.; Interwoven Inc., a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based provider of enterprise-class content management software; Bowstreet, a Lynnfield, Mass.-based business Web platform provider; and e-business infrastructure software company BEA Systems Inc., San Jose. The committee initially plans to base its work on the Business Transaction Protocol (BTP) specification -- an XML-based vocabulary protocol submitted to OASIS by BEA. OASIS is an international not-for-profit consortium to advance electronic business by promoting open, collaborative development of interoperability specifications.