(February 26, 200) - Members of the OASIS standards consortium announced plans to collaborate on the development of a generic and open model for ensuring reliable message delivery for Web services. The new OASIS Web Services Reliable Messaging (WS-RM) Technical Committee will work to establish a standard, interoperable way of achieving reliability at the SOAP messaging level and potentially with other messaging protocols.

The WS-Reliability specification, published by Fujitsu, Hitachi, Oracle, NEC, Sonic Software, and Sun Microsystems, will be submitted as input for the OASIS WS-RM Technical Committee. Other contributions are welcome. The group plans to work closely with related OASIS Technical Committees, such as the ebXML Messaging Services and the Web Services Security teams, and with relevant efforts of other organizations, such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Services Architecture Working Group.

The OASIS Reliable Messaging specification will address message persistence, acknowledgement and resending, elimination of duplicate messages, ordered delivery, and delivery status awareness for sender and receiver applications. It will provide WSDL definitions for reliable messaging, and the message formats will be specified as SOAP headers and/or body content.

Members of the OASIS WS-RM Technical Committee include Commerce One, Cyclone Commerce, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IONA, NEC, Oracle, SAP, See Beyond, Sonic Software, Sun Microsystems, webMethods, WRQ, and others.

Under the rules adopted by the OASIS WS-RM Technical Committee, each participant has agreed to provide a free license to any of its intellectual property rights which someone building a product to the final technical specification would need. Participation in the technical committee remains open to all organizations and individuals, and OASIS will host an open mail list for public comment. Deliverables of the WSDM TC include a Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) V1.0 Specification, projected for completion in January 2004. This specification is to include WSDL described manageable resources and the XML schema to complete those descriptions. The specification will also define explicit manageability for the components of the Web Services Architecture (WSA) as defined by the W3C.