The Open Group announced an agreement to serve as the certification authority for the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) Forum’s world standard for wireless information and telephony services. For certification testing, The Open Group developed a test suite specification to ensure wireless vendors’ products are compliant with the WAP V1.1 specification. As the certification authority, The Open Group will develop and operate the certification program on behalf of the WAP Forum. The WAP Forum has a large number of specifications describing the functionality and specific coding requirements of wireless phones and other devices for WAP certification. The Open Group’s test suite measures conformance to the Wireless Markup Language (WML) application layer specifications, as well as WMLscript and WMLscript libraries. The certification test uses a WML server that delivers tests that run on the devices or phones, and performs a functionality and interoperability test at the application level. WML, an XML application, serves as the markup language for WAP devices, just as HTML is the markup language for web pages. WMLscript and the associated WMLscript Libraries define a programming language, related to the ECMAscript language used for programs to run on web browsers. The Open Group will develop additional tests for the cache model, which defines how WAP compliant phones and gateways store information. The consortium will also develop tests for the use of WAP phones in multiple languages, ensuring the phones will be able to display numerous characters sets, including Japanese, as well as the ASCII character set. www.opengroup.org