OASIS forms new committee

Standards body the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) has started a committee that will seek to provide guidance on a much-discussed software design pattern called a service-oriented architecture.

The committee, announced Tuesday, will create a reference model for service-oriented architectures, or SOAs, that will seek to improve the understanding of them. "The term SOA is used in an increasing number of contexts with differing--and even conflicting--meanings," said Adobe Systems' Duane Nickull, who is also a chair of the OASIS SOA-RM Technical Committee. In general, an SOA is a method of designing applications so that individual programs can be used in different scenarios. A network authentication process, for example, could be used by many departments within a company. Software companies and corporate customers are incorporating an SOA design in business applications to provide a more flexible and cost-effective software infrastructure.