InfoWorld — OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards , said on Wednesday that it was launching a new effort to simplify the development of standards-based SOA applications, according to an OASIS statement.

The Open CSA (Open Composite Services Architecture) Member Section  will promote development and use of the SCA (Service Component Architecture) and SDO (Service Data Objects) specifications . Both specifications address obstacles to creating reusable, cross-vendor SOA components, such as applications and services.

The move follows the transfer in March of the SCA and SDO specifications to OASIS by the OSOA (Open SOA Collaboration), an industry group of SOA players that includes BEA, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Iona, and others.

SCA specifications define standard models for creating SOA services and combining them into SOAs. The SDO specification governs how data is handled as it is passed between SOA applications.

The Open CSA Member Section will coordinate the standardization of multiple specifications and promote adoption of SCA and SDO through education and outreach to industry, OASIS said.

"OASIS appreciates the work of the Open SOA Collaboration to see these specifications through their incubation stage and then contribute them into the open standards process," according to a published statement by OASIS president and CEO Patrick Gannon . "Advancing this work within OASIS will enable the SCA and SDO specifications to receive input from a broader international community of software developers, systems integrators, and users.

Work on SCA and SDO dates to November, 2005, when representatives from leading companies in the SOA space began work on a language-neutral programming model for SOA developers.

On Wednesday, many of those companies signaled continuing support for the new Open CSA group.

"The adoption of SCA/SDO will provide the missing link between process and data in composite SOA application implementation," said Karla Norsworthy , vice president of software standards at IBM. "Our customers are enthusiastic about the capabilities of these specifications, which dramatically improve developers' ability to create applications and solutions in an SOA style."