Members of the OASIS standards consortium have formed a technical committee to develop standards to automate the translation and localization process as a Web service. The effort brings together DataPower, IBM, the Localisation Research Centre, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and others in a collaboration that will use Web services as the backbone to a workflow linking the tasks that comprise a complex software localization project. The new OASIS Technical Committee will concentrate first on defining service types that are relevant to the software/content localization and translation industry. Their specification will drive the development of WSDL documents that will ultimately be published in a UDDI registry and potentially also in an ebXML registry. The OASIS Translation Web Services Technical Committee joins another localization effort at OASIS — one that works to develop an XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF). The two groups plan to coordinate their efforts. www.oasis-open.org