SPECIAL NOTICE-INVITATION TO WORK WITH NIST ON TEST TOOLS AND TEST DATA FOR REGISTRIES AND REPOSITORIES

Notice Date

October 19, 2000

Contracting Office

National Institute of Standards & Technology, Acquisition & Assistance Div.,100 Bureau Drive Stop 3572, Bldg. 301, Rm B117, Gaithersburg, MD 20899-3572

ZIP Code

20899-3572

E-Mail Address

Lisa Carnahan (lisa.carnahan@nist.gov)

Description

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is working with industry to develop specifications and implementations that will enable the discovery and retrieval of structured information via registries and repositories. NIST is inviting parties interested in these issues to contribute software, test data and/or work with NIST to develop reference implementations, test tools and test data for registries and repositories. An industry's ability to use electronic commerce (EC) effectively depends primarily on that industry's ability to create, manipulate and transmit intelligent information among partners and throughout the industry. The extensible Markup Language (XML), which is already targeted as the enabling technology for EC, is the primary standard by which industries are defining the structure and semantics of their information. XML is a base recommendation coupled with a set of emerging specifications and related "vocabularies" based upon the XML syntax. In the simplest sense, the benefits of XML will only be achieved if organizations of a significant number are using the same XML documents. Therefore, these XML documents must be available for partners to discover and retrieve. A registry/repository is a mechanism used to discover and retrieve documents, templates, software (i.e., objects and resources) over the Internet. A registry is the mechanism used to discover the object. The registry provides information about the object, including the location of the object. A repository is where the object resides. A user retrieves an object from a repository. NIST, in its collaborations with industry, plans to provide reference implementations, test tools, and test data for emerging registry and repository specifications. The reference implementations, test tools and test data are intended to be used by those implementing these specifications. These tools, when used during a product's development, can aid in building a correct implementation with regard to these specifications. If interested, please contact Lisa Carnahan at lisa.carnahan@nist.gov, NIST 100 Bureau Drive, MS 8970, Building 820, Gaithersburg, Md. 20899 by January 30, 2001.

Web Link

NIST Contracts Office (http://www.nist.gov/admin/od/contract/contract.htm)

Record

Loren Data Corp. 20001023/SPMSC013.HTM (W-293 SN5046X8)