Group works on e-forms standards

A new team of government and industry officials will spend the next five months evaluating standards for electronic forms, a CIO Council member said yesterday.The E-Forms for E-Government project was one of several pilots that involve Extensible Markup Language and Web services updated by Brand L. Niemann at the annual FedWeb conference in Arlington, Va. Niemann, an Environmental Protection Agency computer scientist, heads the CIO Council’s XML Web Services Working Group.The e-forms group, which held its first meeting in March, is studying the strengths and weaknesses of various forms technologies and will recommend a core set of standards for federal use. The project’s participants will design several online prototypes and will publish white papers on the technologies they try.About 40 government and industry representatives have joined the E-Forms for E-Government effort, Niemann said. The group plans to deliver an interim report in June and a final report in October.Rick Rogers, chief executive officer of Fenestra Technologies Corp. of Germantown, Md., is the team leader of the project, which has a home page at . At the conference, Rogers demonstrated the Generalized Instrument Design System, an e-forms application that his company developed for the Census Bureau’s Economic Census Program [see story at ].Niemann also said XML Collaborator, an information design tool that was one of six incubator projects sponsored by the XML Web Services Working Group, is ready for operational status. Blue Oxide Technologies LLC of Charles Town, W.Va., developed the tool, and the company will soon unveil a public Web site demonstrating the tool, Niemann said.FedWeb continues today at the Arlington campus of George Mason University.