OASIS

Stands for "Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards." To someone backpacking through the Sahara, this is not the type of OASIS you want to see. But is it a welcome sight in the computer science world. OASIS is a non-profit, global consortium that supports the development and adoption of e-business standards.

While it won't quench your thirst in the middle of the desert, OASIS does provide several useful technology standards. Common standards regulated by the OASIS consortium include protocols, file formats, and markup languages. Hardware and software companies often work with OASIS to develop and institute standards that are efficient and effective.

The standards produced by OASIS are open standards, which means they can be used by any company or organization. This allows multiple companies to develop products based on the same standard, which offers a high degree of interoperability between different computer systems. For example, a file format standardized by OASIS may be supported by several different programs. Because each program can save files in the same format, the files can be opened by any of the programs without needing to be converted or translated. This makes transferring files between applications or even different systems a seamless process.