Berners-Lee: Standards groups are 'very different places'

Computerworld - Tim Berners-Lee, director of the W3C, spoke with Computerworld this month about recent moves by technology vendors to submit Web services standards proposals to OASIS instead of his organization.

What are your thoughts about that trend? OASIS and the W3C are very different places altogether. The rules are very different. [At the W3C,] a lot of that has to do with getting everybody on board, making sure everything is coordinated and trying to get the standard very widely deployed. [We require] a demonstration of implementation, of interoperability, before something can become a standard. We have public review. We have requirements that the groups be chartered to liaise with groups which have related technology.
What OASIS provides is somewhere you can start an activity with no prior requirements. Three companies can just get together, they can start a group, and there's nothing to prevent the same thing [from] being done in different organizations. There's nearly no management control at all. It's faster.

Do you think it's a dangerous trend? For core standards for a big new market area, I think it's very important that they are widely accepted by everybody. . . . For an application-level specification or for something like a programming language, you can have three, four, five, eight of those around and mix them together to a certain extent. So in some areas, it doesn't hurt. But for the foundational specs of the Web services architecture, I feel that it's important to have the W3C.

Do you have concerns about what's happening with the BPEL specification within OASIS and the W3C's similar standards efforts on choreographing Web services? I do have concerns about that. I feel that's an area where it's not obvious how things are going to work out for the best, because there's no mechanism for W3C and OASIS to coordinate.

Some vendors say that the W3C is concentrating too much on the Semantic Web initiative and not enough on Web services. Do you think that's a misguided impression? Obviously, there are some members for whom Web services are absolutely the thing. We try to keep it balanced. There are other people who tell us, "Why are you wasting your time on all this Web services garbage? If [companies] would just use the Semantic Web, it would all happen so easily."