Committee to craft standard based on spec from IBM, Microsoft, BEA The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards on Tuesday agreed to form a committee to investigate crafting a Web services standard for process workflow. The standard would be based on a specification originally written by IBM, Microsoft, and BEA Systems.OASIS formed the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WSBPEL) technical committee to take over work on the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) specification. That specification is a workflow language that describes the Web services that need to be executed as part of a business process, the order in which they are executed, and the type of data they share.The new OASIS committee heats up the competition to create a business process workflow standard. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is working on the Web Services Choreography Interface (WSCI), which is supported by Sun and a host of others including BPMI.org, Commerce One, Fujitsu, Intalio, IONA, Oracle, SAP, and SeeBeyond.IBM, Microsoft, and its partners will submit royalty-free Version 1.1 of BPEL4WS to OASIS on May 16 during the committee’s first formal meeting. The committee says it plans to establish a relationship with the W3C.The relationship may take some smoothing over since not more than a month ago Microsoft joined the WSCI group just in time for its first meeting and then abruptly resigned. Now, Microsoft and its partners have firmly established their intention to drive a specification within another standards body. Diane Jordan of IBM and John Evdemon of Microsoft will be the co-chairs of the technical committee. Other members of the committee include Booz Allen Hamilton, Commerce One, E2open, EDS, NEC, Novell, Sybase, Tibco Software, Vignette, and Waveset. Software DevelopmentTechnology Industry