The goal of the Standards Registry Committee is to develop specifications that will promote the exchange of information between organizations developing standards and other consensus documents, and make more coherent and systematic information about these organizations' activities available to the public in order to

• increase collaboration between the organizations;
• encourage the development of interoperable specifications;
• increase participation in standards efforts; and
• encourage adoption of completed specifications by users.

The Standards Registry Committee will create the following:

1. A simple specification for metadata that describes both in-progress and completed technical work created by SDOs. The metadata should be flexible enough to describe the work of most SDOs, and simple enough that it can be implemented at very little cost.
2. Selection of a taxonomy that can be used to classify each SDO's specifications.
3. A recommendation for how standards registries, both current and future, can be used together to allow common searching across the registries hosted by various organizations.

The committee's goal is to create the above deliverables in three to six months.

Existing work should be used where possible and appropriate, and completed work should be in conformance with existing international standards as appropriate.

The deliverables of the committee will be considered public property and may be freely used by anyone.

Meetings of the committee will be held every other Tuesday at 12:00 noon EST (5:00 p.m. GMT). See the mail list for call-in information and other meeting details.

Membership in the StdsReg Committee is open to any person who can and will contribute to the deliverables of the committee. Active participation is expected. You may sign up for the committee by subscribing to the committee's mail list.

Chair of the committee is Karl Best, OASIS (karl.best@oasis-open.org)

Secretariat is John Ketchell, CEN-ISSS (john.ketchell@cenorm.be)

Editor is Bob Hager, ANSI (bhager@ansi.org)

A number of the committee members have introduced themselves on the mail list, stating their reasons for and interests in participating in the Standards Registry committee.

Subscriptions to the StdsReg committee mail list is open to the public. Interested participants should subscribe to the committee mail list by sending an email with the word "subscribe" as the body of the message to stdsreg-request@lists.oasis-open.org. You must be a subscriber to post a message to the list.

The mail list archives are publicly viewable; go to http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/stdsreg/

ANSI Newsletter article on the Standards Registry committee; 31 May 2002