More details have emerged on the new umbrella European communication standards organisation, the European Workshop for Open Systems, or EWOS (CI No 861), intended to coordinate the activities of a plethora of existing standards groups currently working on developing profiles of open systems interconnection sometimes at cross purposes: the new organisation is to be officially launched on March 1 1988, and will be sponsored by eight European standards committees to the tune of UKP20,000 each; EWOS will concentrate primarily on those areas of research where previous research programmes have overlapped, namely message handling system, file transfer and messaging and the lower layers of the open systems model; two further research efforts by EWOS are expected to be announced in June to look into directories and real time open systemsinter connection; a full-time director for EWOS is to be named shortly.
