As posted at http://www.w3.org/Submission/, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has acknowledged the member submission of the Service Modeling Language (SML) specification documents. Version 1.0 of the specification documents, namely the SML Language Specification and the SML Interchange Format Specification are publicly available at the W3C member submissions web site. 

Some SML insight from the W3C team may be found in the teams' comments posted at http://www.w3.org/Submission/2007/01/Comment:

  • "... SML is properly viewed not as a schema language competing with XML Schema 1.0, nor as a revision of XML Schema 1.0, but as a layer of inter-document constraints designed to be used on top of XML Schema."
     
  • "SML can thus be interpreted as providing, at the same time, (a) a layered extension of XML Schema, which allows validation to enforce structural and referential integrity constraints within a single XML document but also across multiple documents, and (b) a subset or profile of XML Schema 1.0." 

And there is much more work to be done with regards to SML. As my associate Pratul Dublish observes in his blog:

  • "...this does not mean that these specifications have become W3C Recommendations. We have a lot of work ahead of us to charter and create an SML working group within W3C and start the process to put these specifications on recommendation track."

Congratulations to the submitting W3C Members (including BEA, CA, Cisco, EMC (Documentum), HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems), and to all participants in the SL Working Group, for reaching this milestone.

- mark