OASIS has formed a technical committee to work on a common language for sharing security information about transactions and end users among e-business companies.

The work of the TC will be based initially on the Security Services Markup Language (S2ML), a joint initiative between Netegrity and Art Technology Group, Bowstreet, Commerce One, Jamcracker, Oracle, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Sun Microsystems, TIBCO Software Inc., VeriSign, and webMethods. S2ML was only announced recently, on November 15.

Marc Chanliau of Netegrity, who will chair the new OASIS TC, commented:

We chose to develop XML security specifications within the OASIS, because we wanted to ensure that S2ML became an open industry standard ...

This move is certainly in contrast to the formation by Microsoft, Ariba and IBM of UDDI, and the decision to develop the specification under OASIS is to be welcomed. Speaking to the XML 2000 conference yesterday, Karl Best of OASIS promoted his organization's "democratic" processes to the audience, say they offered an alternative to a handful of "800lb gorillas" who force the industry to fall in with their plans.