In the past year it would be fair to say that LIXI’s standards
development efforts have widened considerably in scope and that
this in turn has required us to create and develop a new level
of formality and professionalism. The new LIXI architecture
has provided a solid technical foundation for new developments
however we quickly realised that the expanding number of standards
presented major management and maintenance hurdles. This has
resulted in huge efforts going on “behind the scenes”
to document LIXI’s methods and procedures and to develop
online documentation tools to improve our transparency and accessibility
to members. An unfortunate side effect has been the delay of
CAL 1.3 but we have just about made it through to the other
side at last.
Future working groups can now be given a detailed LIXI methodology
for guidance, plus template and example documents designed to
ease their workload and ensure a consistent standard in the
requirements documents they generate. Better yet, their requirements
will be published online in a format that will link directly
to the consequent ontologies, thereby making it easy for everyone
to see that their needs have been met in the implemented standards
and to track back to the requirements to find out exactly why
the standards are built the way they are.
Thanks to the sterling efforts of Dean Melia and Marcus Carr
(plus many others) we been able to do all this while still progressing
with multiple new standards. CAL 1.3 (incorporating the old
Backchannel work), Settlements, Title Insurance and Commissions
are at, or very close to, Request For Comments release. The
Valuations working group has produced an outstanding requirements
document and a working draft of a Valuations ontology is not
far away. The Mortgage Insurance working group has re-convened
and should also be able to deliver a greatly improved standard
for LMI transactions in the near future. All of this work has
been done in compliance with the new architecture so you will
be able to see that we have had a very busy year.
Priorities for the coming year will include re-visiting our
Messaging Recommendation and upgrading it to the status of a
standard. In the early days everyone’s approaches to messaging
were so varied as to make a standard impractical but it looks
like this is changing fast and many members have expressed interest
in having a standard approach to comply with. For further details
of LIXI’s future initiatives please refer to the LIXI Roadmap
– and as always, comments on the Roadmap are very welcome.
