CGM Open Participation in OASIS Summer Workshops
1998

As part of the continuing cooperation between CGM Open and OASIS, CGM Open was invited to send representatives to the OASIS Summer Workshops held in San Diego on July 29 and 30, 1998. OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, was founded in 1993 as SGML Open. Four CGM Open representatives attended the workshops: Dave Cruikshank of Boeing, Lofton Henderson of HSI/INSO (President of CGM Open), Alan Hester of Xerox, and Dorothy Weatherby of InterCAP.

The summer workshops are held annually to advance general activities and planning by the OASIS marketing, education, and technical committees. CGM Open participation in the workshops included an address to the technical plenary session by Dave Cruikshank; participation in a discussion of SGML-CGM harmonization; a meeting with the program committee for XML '98, a GCA-sponsored conference to be held in Chicago in November; and a meeting with members of the OASIS board of directors to discuss closer cooperation between the two organizations.

The XML98 program committee agreed to CGM Open's proposal to sponsor the graphics track at the conference. The track will include a CGM tutorial by Lofton Henderson and John Gebhardt, a Web graphics panel discussion moderated by Lynne Rosenthal of NIST, user presentations of CGM implementations, and a session of presentations highlighting various CGM applications.

The SGML-CGM harmonization discussion elicited five ways in which the two groups could work together. Responsible parties were identified and are listed in parentheses.

1. Investigate the use of property sets for CGM (Lofton Henderson, Dave Cruikshank, Eliot Kimber)
2. Investigate the feasibility of XML encoding of CGM (Lofton Henderson, Dave Cruikshank, Ken Holman)
3. Investigate the use of an XML/HTML companion file for CGM (Dave Cruikshank, Norbert Mikula)
4. Provide CGM Open with assistance in dealing with the W3C (OASIS members who head W3C working groups)
5. Store CGM profiles in OASIS registry/repository.