Microsoft Security Bulletin MS04-025 described multiple problems with vulnerable versions of Internet Explorer. MITRE’s Open Vulnerability Assessment Language project uses pseudocode to help identify vulnerabilities. The language is a way to link together all of the different references and names for this particular vulnerability. In July Javier Fernandez-Sanguino mentioned OVAL on the nessus-announce mailing list, but I wasn’t able to track down any more recent references to integrating OVAL into the Nessus project.”]
Source: https://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2004/12/open-vulnerability-assessment-language.html