OASIS CIQ TC seeking new members

[Karl Best <karl.best@oasis-open.org>]

The OASIS Customer Information Quality (CIQ) TC has been working for the
past several months on specifications for customer information, but has
recently lost some key members, so is looking for additional participants to
help complete the work.

The work of the TC is described by the TC chair as follows:

The objective of the TC (http://www.oasis-open.org/committee/ciq) is to
deliver global XML Standards for Customer Information/Profile Management to
the industry. The goal of the TC is to develop two standards:

* A standard that is able to describe name and address data of any country

* A standard to describe non-address customer data such as Tel/fax/cell,
email, personal details, company details, loyalty/ID cards, etc. A customer
is either a person or an organisation.

Defining a global standard for name and address data that is the most
complex customer data is a challenge. CIQ took this challenge a year ago and
is now in the verge of releasing its first version of the standard. The
standard is called eXtensible Name and Address Language (xNAL). This
standard was developed by the TC that had members who have over 15 years of
expertise in managing customer name and address data. This standard can
handle name and address data from more than 80 countries and is being tuned
now to make it truly global. The beauty of this standard is that the data
can be fragmented into detailed level or can be represented in a higher
abstract level.  For example:

 23 Archer Street,
 Chatswood,
 NSW 2067,
 Australia

Either of the following is valid according to the standard:

 <AddressLines>
  <AddressLine>23 Archer Street</AddressLine>
  <AddressLine>Chatswood</AddressLine>
  <AddressLine>NSW 2067</AddressLine>
  <AddressLine>Australia</AddressLine>
 </AddressLine>

 OR

 <AddressDetails>
  <Country>
   <CountryName>Australia</CountryName>
   <AdministraiveArea Type="State">
    <AdministrativeAreaName>NSW</AdministrativeAreaName>
    <Locality Type="Suburb">
     <LocalityName>Chatswood</LocalityName>
     <Street>
       <StreetName>Archer</StreetName>
       <StreetType>Street</StreetType>
       <StreetNumber>23</StreetNumber>
     </Street>
     <PostalCode>
      <PostalCodeNumber>2067</PostalCodeNumber>
     </PostalCode>
    </Locality>
   </AdministrativeArea>
  </Country>
 </AddressDetails>

Detailed level and abstract level can also be mixed within the same data.
For example <StreetName> can be just the name of the street as above or it
can be "Archer Street". Or, AddressLine can be mixed with detailed
description.

For maintenance & flexibility purposes, xNAL has been broken up into two
languages that it uses as references. The languages are:

* xNL : eXtensible Name Language, that deals with customer name data (a
customer can be a person or company) and provides more than 30 XML tags to
represent name data. It can also handle relationships (eg. C/O, W/O, etc...)

* xAL: eXtensible Address Language, that deals with customer address data
and provides more than 100 XML tags to represent the data. It can handle
multiple addresses for a customer that helps to keep track of customer
address changes. It has been tested for over 80 countries' address data.

The other standard that the committee has developed to define
customer-centric data is xCIL, the eXtensible Customer Information Language.
xCIL also uses xNL and xAL as references. It provides more than 120 XML tags
to represent customer data at a detailed level or at an abstract level.

The specifications document, DTDs and real-world examples for xNAL and xCIL
are now available on the TC web page.

Note that this committee is not concentrating on transport layer, security
layer, privacy etc. of customer data; we will collaberate with other groups
who are doing this work. CIQ is concentrating on developing a common and
global standard for understanding, representing and exchanging/sharing
customer by improving quality and integrity of the data.

The committee is also working on a new standard called xCRL (eXtensible
Customer Relationship Language) that will enable dealing with:
- Person to Person relationships (contact details, dependency, trustees,
beneficiaries, etc...)
- Person to company relationships, and (trading as, dependency, contact
details, etc..)
- company to company relationships (parent-subsidiary, trading as, doing
business, etc...)

INVITATION TO PARTICIPATE

CIQ is seeking more members to join the TC and contribute to this effort.
Those interested in joinging the TC should send an e-mail to the Chair of
the TC, Mr. Ram Kumar (rkumar@msi.com.au), Chief Technologist & Architect of
MasterSoft International Pty. Ltd. Ram can be directly contacted at
+61-2-98445404. You must be an OASIS Individual member or an employee of an
OASIS member organization in order to become a member of the TC.

OASIS members who wish to subscribe to the TC mailing list should send a
message to ciq-request@lists.oasis-open.org with the word "subscribe" as the
body of the message.


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