Outcome May Have Big Potential Impact on Any Industry with Time-related Problems

McKinleyville, CA – September 13, 2010

CalConnect and OASIS have been tasked jointly by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) to produce one of the standards that will make it possible to monitor, predict and manage power consumption. The standard known as WS-Calendar addresses the need for the accurate and secure exchange of scheduling data in Smart Grid applications and elsewhere.

“First and foremost, the result of our joint technical effort is intrinsic to making the Smart Grid intelligent in terms of power management,” says CalConnect Executive Director Dave Thewlis. “But beyond that, it has profound implications for any other industry with time-related issues, such as finance and medicine.”

At the outset of the WS-Calendar project, OASIS joined CalConnect and CalConnect joined OASIS as part of a reciprocal membership agreement between the two organizations. OASIS then formed the WS-Calendar Technical Committee to adapt existing calendaring standards (those used in human interactions) for Web services, while CalConnect’s XML Technical Committee developed standards for use by and within WS-Calendar.

“Existing calendaring standards are CalConnect’s home territory,” Thewlis added, “and that is why collaborating with OASIS makes so much sense in terms of technical expertise and efficiency.”

The WS-Calendar Committee’s work is based on the iCalendar (IETF RFC 5545) xCal XML serialization specification from CalConnect.org, and on the CalWS-Restful Web Services Calendaring API specification developed by CalConnect for this project, and which is a core part of WS-Calendar.

“Although the current impetus accelerating the development of WS-Calendar is the needs of smart grids,” explained Toby Considine of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, chair of the OASIS WS-Calendar Technical Committee, “the specification’s model for requesting and coordinating service performance can be used wherever different organizations must coordinate long running processes, including business process applications, emergency management, and smart buildings.”

Thewlis noted the importance of the CalWS work and the relationship with OASIS by saying, “While CalWS was originally developed with the OASIS Smart Grid effort in mind, it is our intention for it to evolve to become a full web services interface for calendaring and scheduling operations. Hence CalWS will continue to be enhanced, and CalConnect and OASIS will work together to ensure that the CalConnect and OASIS versions are fully harmonized going forward.”

Participation in the WS-Calendar Technical Committee is open to all interested parties. Archives of the Committee’s work are accessible to both members and non-members. OASIS is expected to announce a first public review of WS-Calendar 1.0 next month.

Participation in the XML Technical Committee is open to all members of CalConnect. CalConnect will formally publish CalWS this month as a CalConnect Proposal.

In recognition of the level and closeness of the joint work done by the OASIS WS-Calendar Technical Committee and the CalConnect XML Technical Committee, OASIS and CalConnect are providing press releases in parallel; the OASIS release may be found at http://www.oasis-open.org/news/oasis-news-2010-09-13.php.

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium (CalConnect) is a partnership among vendors, developers, and customers to advance calendaring and scheduling standards and implementations. The mission is to provide mechanisms to allow calendaring and scheduling methodologies to interoperate, and to promote broad understanding of these methodologies so that calendaring and scheduling tools and applications can enter the mainstream of computing.

The Consortium develops recommendations for improvement and extension of relevant standards, develops requirements and use cases for calendaring and scheduling specifications, conducts interoperability testing for calendaring and scheduling implementations, and promotes calendaring and scheduling.

Organizational members are Apple, Binary Tree, Cabo Communications, Carnegie Mellon, dotCal, Eventful, Genentech, Google, IBM, IceWarp, Intand, Kerio Technologies, MailSite, Microsoft, Mozilla Foundation, NASA, New York University, Nokia, Notify Technology, OASIS, Oracle, Patricia Egen Consulting, PeopleCube, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Stanford University, Stockholm University, SWAMI (Swedish Alliance for Middleware Infrastructure), Synchronica, University of California, University of Wisconsin, Yahoo!, and Zimbra.

Additional information:
OASIS WS-Calendar Technical Committee
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ws-calendar/

CalConnect XML Technical Committee
http://www.calconnect.org/tc-xml