The recent OASIS eGovernment Brussels workshop: Public Finance provided a good overview of recent work on ICT solutions using SOA and Web Services in the public sector. Due to a last-minute cancellation by one of the other speakers, I had the opportunity to present some of the recent work done in the OASIS ebXML Messaging Technical Committee.

This includes some of the work done by the  AS4 subcommittee, which is working on a profile of version 3.0 of ebXML Messaging that focusses on the needs of the EDI data exchange, similar to the AS2 and other EDIINT protocols.

The work on the transparent multihop messaging profile greatly extends the functionality of ebXML and Web Services messaging by defining store-and-forward intermediaries and store-and-collect mailbox style functionality. This functionality, of great relevance to small and medium size organizations, is not present in any current WS-* specification. It is, however, used in OSCI, a SOAP-based protocol used in eGovernment in Germany. Incidentally, the architect of OSCI also presented at the conference.