How standards are developed
Each standard is developed by a working group staffed by volunteers from LIXI Member organisations. Ideally a cross section of industry groups is represented in the working group.
The role of the working group is to define the Business Requirements for a transaction (or set of transactions) between two or more parties. For example the Valuations working group developed requirements covering requests and responses between lenders and valuers
The working group develops the standards through a number of meetings and through online review of documents as they are developed. Standards are generally developed in the following phases - timeframes are approximate:
1. Initiation.
2. Development of Business Requirements (3-6 months).
3. Schema / vocabulary development (1 month).
4. Schema / vocabulary review (at least 2 weeks)
5. Request for comments (at least 1 month).
6. Board approval (1-2 weeks, depending upon availability of Board members).
How is a new standard initiated?
A new standard is developed when there is a substantial requirement to warrant a new initiative. Once a general level of interest is shown, a LIXI member contacts the Chair of the LIXI Technical Subcommittee to initiate a working group. The LIXI board will then appoint someone (generally the Technical Author) to chair the first meeting of the new working group. The purpose of the working group will be to develop the Business Requirements for the new standards.
A downloadable boilerplate Business Requirements document is available here
The Standards Development Methodology
LIXI Standards are developed through an iterative approach involving the respective Business Working Groups and the Vocab Group. Requirements are gathered, documented, and re-worked in the Business groups, the Vocab group provides feedback (directly or via questions) to the Business groups and ultimately develops Standards that meet the requirements.
The Business Working Groups
The purpose of the Business Working groups is to define the requirements for a logical set of transactions between two or more parties in the lending process value chain, for example, broker to lender loan applications and responses, lender to valuer valuation requests and responses, etc.
The Business Working Groups are populated principally by volunteers from interested member organizations. Each business requirements working group should ideally have representation from at least 25% of its industry cross-section to give it credibility, but there are no hard and fast rules about this.
The final output of a Business Working Group are working group documents including
• the Business Case or Business Requirements detailing the intent of the standards and the high level business requirements
• a set of Functional Requirements for the Transactions
• a glossary of vocabulary terms and definitions that support the requirements documents
• draft Technical Specifications with as much detail as the business working group can provide to the Vocab working group
Together these documents will guide the Vocab group to develop suitable transaction solutions
The Vocabulary Working Group
This Working Group differs from the Business Working Groups in that it does not formulate Business Requirements, and is not concerned with any particular transaction set. The Vocabulary Working Group is the custodian of the Vocabulary Superset, and meets on request to review the final Business Requirements produced by Working Groups, and the Gap Analysis, plus Change Requests, and Ontology proposals of the Technical Author.
The output of the Vocab group is primarily the XML schema for transaction standards, however the Vocab group will also have significant input into the supporting documentation that is included in the release process.
The Release Process
The request for comment (RFC) phase of the release process gives the members a chance to review the documentation and proposed standards prior to final release. Generally the RFC period is four weeks for the requirements and four weeks for the schema. Changes will be considered at any time throughout this period. Once the RFC process is completed and any changes incorporated, the documents and standards are formally released.
Along with schema, release documents may include any of the following
• Release notes
• A user guide
• An implementation guide
• Inline schema documentation
• A guidebook
Online Collaboration
The LIXI website is the focal point of LIXI documentation. There are three main areas;
• The home page and subsidiary pages with public access describe the purpose and workings of LIXI
• Logged-in users of the LIXI website can download all current published specifications and documents
• The Pageseeder full members area contains the online collaboration tool with discussion topics and work in progress.
Pageseeder is automatically started when a work-in-progress document link is requested. This tool allows collaboration on all Requirements and specification documents. The advantage of online review is that all working group members are looking at the same, most up to date version of each document. When you add a review comment all other group members can see your comment and make their own responses. Online collaboration allows the development of documents to continue between meetings and ensures all members of the working group can contribute to the final document. Comments can be posted at a fine level of granularity eg against each field, and each posting can commence a discussion thread. Once the Online Requirements documents are prepared, along with the proposed Ontology, there will be a useful mapping from the Requirement to the solution in the Ontology. This mapping can be further discussed via pageseeder within the Ontology.
For more information on the pageseeder tools refer to pageseeder
