OSI for Libraries: Standards to Services (1992)

3. FUNCTIONAL STANDARDS

3.1 Profiles

To constrain the number of implementation alternatives, standards bodies, user groups, and implementors' groups develop agreements on combinations of OSI standards, as well as the selection of options within each standard, to support specific functions (e.g., electronic messaging, file transfer and interlibrary loan messaging) (Cerni, 1990). Such agreements are known as functional profiles and provide the basis for OSI-product development.

Functional profiles provide implementors with a standardized set of agreed choices that will allow software products to interwork with other software products designed to support the same profile. However, a functional profile does not refer to just one standard; for each of the seven layers in the OSI Reference Model, there are a number of base standards defined, each containing a range of options and selections. The profile selects from among the base standards those that are best suited to providing the required functionality and selects the options within each of these standards.

When adhered to by manufacturers, functional profiles increase the likelihood of systems supporting the same functions being able to interwork in an operational environment.

3.2 International Standardized Profiles

SGFS established a framework for preparing, approving and classifying ISPs. The framework documents, entitled TR 10000 Information Technology Framework and Taxonomy of International Standardized Profiles (Part 1 and Part 2), were published in June 1990. Part 1 of this document defines the concept of profiles within OSI and acts as a guideline for organizations developing ISPs. Part 2 of TR 10000 establishes a classification or "taxonomy" by functionality of the various profiles contained in ISPs.

Another function of ISO/IEC JTC1 SGFS is to bring together the activities of the industrial, user and standards groups involved in developing functional profiles. Many of these organizations were working in the area of functional standardization well before ISO became involved in profile development. For those groups which do not have a special relationship to ISO, ISO recognizes them as special liaisons (S-liaisons) to SGFS to allow these groups to participate actively in the development and submission of ISPs for approval.

This S-liaison status has also been granted to three regional workshops:

1. OSI Implementors Workshop (OIW) hosted by NIST
   
2. European Workshop for Open Systems (EWOS)
   
3. Asia-Oceania OSI Workshop (AOW).

An important role of the three regional workshops is to achieve the level of international harmonization necessary to submit a proposed ISP to SGFS for approval. The three regional workshops coordinate their activities through a newly-formed Regional Workshop Coordinating Committee (RWS-CC).

The process for establishing ISPs differs from the procedures whereby international standards are developed. For ISPs, the actual development and international harmonization takes place in the workshops or other S-liaison organizations, outside ISO/IEC JTC1. ISO/IEC JTC1 is only involved in the approval and publication of the ISP. Once it is ratified, maintenance of the ISP is the responsibility of the submitting organization.

The procedures for ISP approval as defined in the TR 10000 documents only cover profiles for OSI base standards that fall within the domain of JTC1. In June 1991, a number of ISO Technical Committees met with SGFS representatives to discuss the procedures for the approval of functional profiles for standards that the Technical Committees have developed. There was agreement that profile approval should be extended beyond SGFS to these Technical Committees. SGFS is now revising the TR 10000 documents to recognize the role of the ISO Technical Committees as profile approval bodies and is revising the existing taxonomy to accommodate profiles in application areas outside the domain of JTC1.

Technical Committee 46 (TC46), which was responsible for the development and approval of the ILL and SR protocols, is developing procedures similar to those of JTC1 for the processing and approval of ISPs. One of the first profiles to be considered will be for the ILL protocol for use with X.400, the standard for message handling systems.

3.3 Profiles for Bibliographic Applications

IFOBS has been working on a draft ISP for ILL with X.400 since 1989 and expects to have the work completed by mid-1992. It is also initiating work on an ISP for the SR protocol for use in a connection-oriented communications environment.

Another group working on bibliographic profiles is the Expert Group on Libraries (EG-LIB), a working group of the European Workshop on Open Systems (EWOS). EG-LIB was formed at the request of the Commission of the European Communities (CEC) which is interested in the development of European profiles for the ILL and SR standards as well as other standards. As the objectives of IFOBS and EG-LIB are closely related, the two groups are collaborating in several areas.

A recent joint accomplishment is the development of a taxonomy for the ILL and SR profiles that will be added to the existing JTC1 taxonomy as defined in TR10000-2. The Taxonomy of Application Profiles for ISPs for Library and Documentation includes profiles for ILL and SR in combination with each other and with other OSI standards used as the transfer mechanism such as X.400, ACSE and FTAM.

As mentioned earlier in the discussion on profiles, OSI standards contain numerous options to satisfy a wide range of requirements from which an implementor must select. The ILL and SR standards are no exceptions. Below are examples of the issues deliberated by IFOBS in developing an ISP for ILL.

ILL service capabilities

The ILL standards permit the implementation of a number of ILL services: loan, copy/non-returnable, locations, estimate and responder-specific. The ISP can indicate which of these services a system must support, which can be optionally supported and which are excluded from the profile.

Item identification

This portion of the ILL-REQUEST contains the data elements needed to describe the required item, e.g. author, title, sub-title, volume, issue, etc. In the ILL protocol, all these data elements are optional. The ISP can stipulate if any of the data elements should be mandatory for inclusion in an ILL request.

Library identification

A library participating in an ILL transaction can be identified by its symbol, such as a library code, or by its name. The ISP can specify whether an implementation must be capable of supplying one or the other of these forms of identification or both.

Field lengths

The ILL standards do not specify maximum field lengths for the data elements defined in the protocol. These maximum field lengths must therefore be defined in the ILL ISP. Common agreement on the size of the data transmitted and received ensures that important data is not truncated by the receiving system. The ILL ISP can also define the maximum length for the ILL messages.

3.4 Supranational and national profile definition

An example of a country where adaptation of an ISP has occurred is Canada, where an ILL profile was needed for use by vendors developing systems incorporating the ILL protocol. The National Library of Canada, on behalf of the Canadian library community, and in collaboration with the vendors, drafted an Interim Canadian Standardized Profile based on the evolving international profile, but which introduced additional constraints. For example, while the draft ISP declares that all data types in the item identification parameter are optional, the Canadian profile states that the title must always be provided within an ILL-REQUEST. The Canadian profile also supports two data types identified as EXTERNALs within the protocol. EXTERNALs are optional parameters that, if required by a community of protocol users, are defined outside the formal protocol documents. Canada decided to provide within the Canadian version of the profile, the specifications for the EXTERNAL parameters 'national-bibliography-no' and 'system-number'. Their inclusion in an ILL request will enable the automatic checking of the request by these numbers against a bibliographic database.

Because the Canadian profile is based on the international version, it will only be finalized and approved by the Canadian Standards Association once the proposed ISP is approved by ISO.

Within Europe, it will soon become policy to use approved profiles for public procurement. The profiles can be either ISPs or a European harmonized and approved profile known as a European Norme (EN). An EN is a standard processed and approved by EWOS and applies to the members of the European Communities.

3.5 Government Procurement Standards

GOSIPs are developed through consultation with major implementors and user groups. In the U.S., the GOSIP specifications are based on the work of the OSI Implementors Workshop (OIW) where agreement is reached on the implementation of options, classes and subsets contained within protocols. The U.S. GOSIP is intended as a procurement guideline for government departments to ensure that systems separately acquired can interwork (Mills, 1990).

In the U.K., the GOSIP is the responsibility of the Central Computer and Telecommunication Agency. While similar to the U.S. GOSIP specifications, the U.K. GOSIP is oriented more toward user applications and providing technical assistance to help users in the procurement process (Stranger, 1990). An international effort is underway to harmonize the different national GOSIPs and so improve communications between different countries.

In order to promote the procurement of OSI products in Europe, the European Community (EC) is developing the European Procurement Handbook for Open Systems (EPHOS). It is based largely on the U.K. GOSIP specifications with contributions from France and Germany. In Europe, a great deal of emphasis is placed on functional standardization, for two reasons (Hartmann, 1990). First, the European market is characterized by a larger number of computer manufacturers than in North America, resulting in more interworking difficulties. The other strong impetus is the need for interworking among the many countries that are now members of the European Common Market.

One way of ensuring the use of bibliographic protocols by government agencies is to develop GOSIP specifications for the ILL and SR protocol standards. The establishment of government sanctioned profiles for bibliographic protocols will either mandate or strongly encourage the purchase by government libraries of systems that incorporate these OSI standards. A bibliographic GOSIP can be the International Standardized Profile, a nationally approved functional standard or a refinement of either one of these. Whatever version is adopted as a GOSIP, its promotion will ensure that system suppliers are consistent in their implementation of protocol features and functionality. This in turn will facilitate system interoperability among government libraries.