Objective:
To work with ANSI to provide a proof of concept for a federated registry of electronic business standards and standards development projects that originating standards organizations could freely use to share metadata about the scope, location and availability of these standards, the scope and status of projects, proposed projects and documents from these projects.

Background:
There are numerous overlapping eBusiness standards projects, gaps in needed capabilities and very little progress in convergence to common, complete solutions. Additionally, there are a number of industry eBusiness initiatives with overlapping objectives and requirements. Yet, there are no effective mechanisms for facilitating collaboration and convergence among these initiatives.

Business and governmental users should be guided to compose their information interchange systems from publicly available open standards. When such uses employ standardized methods, they enjoy greater breadth of interoperability among parties and systems; reductions in cost; significant reductions in dependence and lock-in on a single vendor or software choice; and importantly, are promoting freer, barrier-less trade.

In 2007, there are many data specifications available to support electronic business and information exchange transactions. Particularly, user organizations almost always will need to compose a device-specific message with multiple standards for messaging, access, security, storage, etc. in order to achieve interoperability and automated execution of interacting business applications and networks. There is insufficient coordination and collaboration among standards development organizations (SDOs) during the planning and development of new specifications to support electronic business and interoperability. This results in duplication and inefficient assignment of the limited resources available for supporting the development, deployment and maintenance of electronic business standards. If anything, the implementer faces too many choices, and little opportunity to review convenient aggregated information. Standards are proposed and supplied by an ever-expanding set of organizations. Many of those organizations maintain their own lists of available self-produced standards, but little progress has been made towards cross-organizational lists or resources. Standards sources tend to prefer to provision their own data about their specifications in their own way.

Industry organizations have repeatedly approached NIST to make progress on overcoming this major problem. In May 2007, these concerns were again raised by industry consortia representatives at the annual meeting of the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) Plenary (ACORD, JAI, AIAG, CIDX, IATA, et al.).

Page created October 2007

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