Election Markup Language (EML) Version 5.0 Submitted for OASIS Approval

OASIS announced that the Election and Voter Services Technical Committee
has submitted the "Election Markup Language (EML) Version 5.0"
specification as an approved (CS 01) Committee Specification for
consideration as an OASIS Standard. A membership vote on the specification
is scheduled for November 16, 2007 through November 30, 2007. Institutional
representatives from Accenture, Boynings Consulting Ltd, EDS, Election
Systems & Software, IBM, Opt2Vote Ltd, Oracle, Secstan, and University
of California (Berkeley) are current members of the TC. The OASIS TC to
was chartered to develop a standard for the structured interchange among
hardware, software, and service providers who engage in any aspect of
providing election or voter services to public or private organizations
which is multinational (global acceptance), flexible (effective across
different voting regimes and voting channels), multilingual, adaptable
(support elections in private and public sectors), and secure. Members of
the TC have been liaising very closely with the IEEE Voting System
Electronic Data Interchange Project 1622, and their draft specification
is seen as a compatible subset and USA localisation of EML. EML is
designed to be flexible for use in elections and referendums that are
primarily paper-based or that are fully e-enabled. The EML v5.0 four-part
specification includes (1) EML Version 5.0 Process and Data Requirements,
edited by John Borras; it describes the background and purpose of the
Election Markup Language, the electoral processes from which it derives
its structure and the security and audit mechanisms it is designed to
support; (2) EML Data Dictionary, which defines the data used in the
processes and required to be handled by the XML schemas, providing in
tabular format information for each Data Element Name the EML schema
type, list of schemas in which the data element ocurs, and W3C XML
Schema (xs:) type; (3) EML Version 5.0 Schema Descriptions, which
provides an explanation of the core schemas used throughout, definitions
of the simple and complex datatypes, plus the EML schemas themselves
and also covers the conventions used in the specification and the use
of namespaces, as well as the guidance on the constraints, extendibility,
and splitting of messages; (4) EML Version 5.0 XML schemas serialized
in some 42 separate XSD files, also available in ZIP format. More Information See also the OASIS Election and Voter Services Technical Committee: Click Here