Karl F. Best
OASIS - Director, Technical Operations
978.667.5115 x206
karl.best@oasis-open.org  http://www.oasis-open.org



Position Paper for W3C QA Workshop
Karl Best, Director of Technical Operations, OASIS
karl.best@oasis-open.org

OASIS is an XML industry member consortium dedicated to the promotion of
structured infromation standards. Part of our mission is to make XML
specifications and standards more useful and usable. We do this by building
upon existing specifications and standards, providing horizontal and
vertical implementations and interoperability and conformance specifications
for those standards.

OASIS has been doing XML conformance work for some time now, and has a
number of technical committees established doing this work. OASIS has
recently announced the results of some of this work: an XML conformance test
suite was annnounced in July 1999, a DOM conformance test suite was
announced in February 2001, and a conformance test suite for XML 2nd edition
was announced in March 2001.

Our current technical committees related to conformance are the
Interoperability Conformance TC, which develops guidelines for conformance
test suite development; the XML Conformance TC, which has developed test
suites for XML and XML 2nd Edition; and the XSLT Conformance TC, which is
developing test suites for XSLT. In addition, conformance work for WebCGM is
being done by CGM Open, a member section of OASIS.

OASIS technical committees should work together with W3C working groups to
enhance the value of W3C Recommendations. While a minimum of conformance
work may need to be done by the WG itself, having the majority of
conformance work done by an outisde party, for example an OASIS conformance
TC, would provide a "outsider's view" or "second opinion" on the W3C work by
a qualified, friendly technical group. Doing so gives a broader perspective
to the work from a different set of members operating under a different
technical process, whose mission is not restricted only to the World Wide
Web.