GCA Launches IDEAlliance

XML '99 held excitement on many quarters.  Of course, I was thrilled at the 65% increase in attendance over 1998.  And I was happy to see the largest Expo of XML-based tools ever.  But perhaps the most gratifying for me was the launch of GCA's new affiliate, IDEAlliance.

So what is IDEAlliance, anyway?  Well, IDEAlliance stands for International Digital Enterprise Alliance.  It is a not-for-profit corporation dedicated to the development and application of digital information standards.  IDEAlliance replaces it's predecessor GCARI with a new name and a broader industry scope.  The formation of IDEAlliance is the latest step in GCA’s more than 30-year history of fostering the development of SGML, XML, and related structured information standards.

IDEAlliance also replaces GCARI in sponsoring the industry’s premier XML exposition events in North America, Europe, and Australia. The 1999 IDEAlliance Philadelphia event included two conferences (XML ’99 and Markup Technologies ’99) with a total of 12 tracks and 260 speakers, supported by 32 tutorials and accompanied by the world’s largest XML exposition, with more than 65 hardware, software, and service organizations in attendance that support the application of these information interoperability standards for text, image, and business data exchange.

Along with the new identity, IDEAlliance has new staff to support its activities.  New to IDEAlliance are Paul Conn, Chief Technology Officer (formerly Program Manager of ATA Spec 2000) and Pete Janhunen the new Chief Information Officer.  Marion Elledge serves as Vice President of Business Development.  And Norman Scharpf serves as President and CEO of IDEAlliance.  I am honored to serve IDEAlliance as Chief Technical Consultant.

IDEAlliance currently hosts a wide variety of standards.  In addition to supporting the technical work by funding the meetings, conference call, Web site, and technical consulting expenses, IDEAlliance also packages marketing for each new standard.  Having an industry standard is only 50% of the story.  Unless the public is aware the standard exists and learns how to use the standard, it has little chance of success.  So the IDEAlliance approach is to foster both the technical work and marketing as well.

The IDEAlliance standards development philosophy is based on the importance of the user community to the development of any standard.  IDEAlliance standards are developed with the user perspective in mind.  In fact, the charter of most IDEAlliance activities include a requirement for a minimum of 50% user company involvement in the technical work.  A user-driven standard has much more credibility than an standard developed by a bunch of venders.  It meets actual user requirements and user involvement provides an effective "on ramp" to standard adoption.

IDEAlliance standards activities include:

• ICE (Information and Content Exchange)
• PRISM (Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata)
• CPExchange (Customer Profile Exchange Network)

In addition, the Independent Consultants Cooperative is now part of IDEAlliance and is known as IDEA-ICC.  The ICC is critical to the IDEAlliance strategy to develop standards because provides a pool of technical expertise that is required to support standards effectively.  Many of the ICC members have a long history of standards development expertise and can help fast-track development in the IDEAlliance environment.

IDEAlliance has been working hard to launch a new activity known as XTM (XML Topic Maps).  IDEA hopes to work jointly with OASIS to engage in technical, educational, and marketing activities to facilitate the use of topic maps based on XML, including but not limited to application on the Web.  Organizational meetings were held in conjunction with the MetaStructures Conference in August and in conjunction with XML '99.  The first working group meeting was held at GCA on January 20-21.

Like its predecessor, the Graphic Communications Association Research Institute (GCARI), IDEAlliance will serve as a host for meetings of the committees and other working groups of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), American National Standards Institute (ANSI), and Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) – groups responsible for the development and maintenance of structured information standards, the Extensible Markup Language (XML), the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), and their derivatives.

I have great hope for the future of IDEAlliance in 2000 and beyond. You can check their new Web site for the latest information.  Just go to www.idealliance.org.

Dianne Kennedy

Editor, XML Files