Re: US gov't announcement of OASIS security standards milestone

Staggs, David (SAIC) wrote:
> Colleagues
> Attached is a notice published in the Federal Register announcing the 
> U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services’ acceptance of Healthcare 
> Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP) Interoperability 
> Specifications (IS).  
> As described at the end of the notice, acceptance triggers legal 
> obligations to use the standards cited by HITSP within certain U.S. 
> Federal agencies and between those agencies and non-agencies. 
   * * *

The notice is published at 74 Federal Register 3599 (21 Jan 09).

Note that SAML, WS-Federation, WS-Trust and XACML all made it into 
this list which, *after* the HISTP tier 2 review process, is likely 
to lead to them being mandated, possibly with some optionality. 
It's not a small thing when a large federal government plans to 
mandate the use of your work in a huge regulated industry.

Even though this is preliminary, still, our warm congratulations, 
both to the TCs and our contributors, and also to the team of TC 
leaders and OASIS staff who have worked for over 3 years now to 
smooth the path  ...  explaining OASIS, open standards issues and 
the use of consortium standards to the HITSP vertical community.

We encourage anyone who wants to follow up on, or talk about, this 
to contact David or his colleagues, who can help better describe in 
detail the levels of approval and next steps in the USA HITSP process.

We put a lot of work into being an interoperable, transparent, 
understandable consortium platform ... so that users and regulators 
can reach these outcomes and repose confident in our members' work. 
   This is why.

Regards Jamie

~ James Bryce Clark
~ Director of Standards Development, OASIS
~ http://www.oasis-open.org/who/staff.php#clark