Industry bodies Oasis, the Open Group and the Object Management Group have launched a white paper designed to promote more transparency in service oriented architecture (SOA) standards.

The paper, entitled Navigating the SOA Open Standards Landscape Around Architecture (PDF), aims to address the problem of multiple overlapping technical products produced by the three organisations.

Oasis said that the paper outlines standards for SOA reference models, ontologies, reference architectures, maturity models, modelling languages and governance, highlighting any similarities and suggesting ways in which the standards could be used together in complementary ways.

The paper could also help the SOA community to select the products most appropriate to their needs, according to Oasis.

"We recognise the value of co-operative, inter-organisational SOA standards development," said Duane Nickull, senior technical evangelist at Adobe, and chairman of the Oasis SOA Reference Model Technical Committee.

"The SOA paradigm is huge, and there is much work to be done. Co-ordination between groups ensures that related SOA standards will work together without unnecessary overlap, contradiction or redundancy."

In other news, Oasis has approved three related web services protocol standards designed to make it easier to find, share and control devices such as mobile phones and printers on a network.

The standards enable the secure exchange of messages, and allow devices to subscribe and receive events from a web service, according to the standards body.