It was developed as part of the Continuous Acquisition and Life-cycle Support (CALS) initiative by the United States Department of Defense.
The EPC subcommittee, of which Harvey Bingham was co-chair and a major contributor, designed the CALS Table Model in 1989–1990.
At that time, the CALS intent for all their technical manuals was to use that document type definition (DTD) to achieve system-neutral interchange of content and structure.
The incomplete specification of the semantics associated with the table model allowed too much freedom for vendor interpretation, and resulted in problems with interchange.
SGML-Open, the former name of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), surveyed the implementing vendors to identify differences as the initial step toward reaching a common interpretation.