I Think We Need to Define This Relationship

OASIS Technical Committee adopts CRML XML standard for defining customer relationships

BOSTON  December 18, 2001  The OASIS Customer Information Quality (CIQ)) Technical Committee announced that it has accepted the submission of CRML, the XML vocabulary specification that defines customer relationships. Originally developed by MSI Business Solutions Pty. Ltd., CRML provides an open, application- and vendor-independent method for describing any type of customer relationship. The OASIS CIQ Technical Committee plans to adopt CRML into its family of customer information specifications including xCIL and xNAL, which define unique customer characteristics.


"Up until now, the OASIS CIQ Technical Committee has concentrated on defining standards to describe characteristics of a customer, such as name, address, phone number, email, etc. Now with CRML, we are able to describe relationships between customers from a business and personal point of view," said Ram Kumar of MSI, chair of the OASIS CIQ Technical Committee. "Because CRML uses xCIL and xNAL as the basis for its vocabulary, it provides the third and final specification needed to identify all aspects of customer information."


Under the CRML standard, a customer can be a person or an organization. CRML accommodates complex customer relationships including person-to-person, person-to-business, and business-to-business.


"The rapid adoption of e-business has created a new world of interoperability between organizations, systems, processes, platforms, tools and, most importantly, data," commented George Langley, director and founder of MSI Business Solutions Pty. Ltd., a sponsor member of OASIS. "To ensure reliability and success, it is necessary to define standards that enable interoperability of data before we even start to think about how other entities can interoperate. A standard way of defining customer relationships and customer information is essential for interoperability to occur. CRML is a major step towards achieving this, and we are confident that migrating its development to OASIS will result in the widest possible adoption of the standard."

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