IDEA http://www.linkaffiliates.net.au/idea10/
Friday, 12 March 2010
* Draft Program

8:00 – 9:00 Registration and Beverages
9:00 – 2:30 Morning Session
9:00 – 9:45 Keynote panel:
International perspectives of interoperability and the benefits of standards

Panelists:
Dr. Rob Abel – IMS Global Learning Consortium
Ian Dolphin – International e-Framework
Paul Jesukiewicz – Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative (ADL)

9:45 – 10:00 Australian response
Peter Croger – Croger Associates Pty Ltd

Today’s interoperability technologies help spawn ‘frictionless innovation.’

By Jeffrey E. Ganek, chairman and CEO, Neustar

Ganek: Standards let companies focus on innovation. Photo: Neustar.

I am sure we have all heard it said (and said ourselves): “Just give me a level playing field!”  The speaker might be talking about government regulation, contract negotiations, marketing spend or even customer expectations, but in all situations “taking the pitch out of the pitch” helps businesses properly allocate resources, effectively direct the marketing spend and more quickly develop new products.  It also allows us to compete directly on the power of our ideas.

In technology, the strong tradition of standards bodies has helped immeasurably to turn ideas into new products.  Standards have helped level the playing field.  As a result, we have the interoperability, compatibility and integration of new technologies that are essential to the health of the industry and key to its role in boosting productivity.

Individual companies can play a just as important role in spurring economic vitality.  I marvel at the power of the iPhone as a software development platform, for example.  It offers functionality from more than 100,000 applications that did not exist before Apple and AT&T launched the phone service in spring 2007.  As a company, Apple (AAPL) has leveled the playing field for software application developers and reduced the cost of innovation.

The effect of eliminating market inequalities was never more dramatically felt than with the consumer adoption of the Internet and the development of the World Wide Web.  Viewed first as a new channel for communications, the Internet quickly became a platform for business development and “frictionless commerce.”  It is the reason that what used to sound like jargon – “Web 1.0” or “2.0” or “3.0” – has real meaning and is fast becoming part of the popular vernacular.

These and other technology advances spurred innovation and competition in a far broader way than either access to capital or legislation ever could.  The work I did at MCI 25 years ago convinced me that Congress and the courts, by eliminating artificial barriers to competition, could create a better deal for the consumer.  But the work I do today at Neustar (NSR) has convinced me that making it easier for people with ideas to innovate is better business.  Call it a commitment to “frictionless innovation.”

Interoperability: not sexy, but essential

If you are unfamiliar with Neustar it is likely because our directory technologies allow companies you do know to deliver many of the services you value and rely on every day.  I can confidently say we “support the infrastructure for communication.” But while what we do may seem deep and distant, it’s really no further away than your fingertips.

As an example, it may seem an easy task to keep your phone number when moving from one mobile carrier to another, but it is a directory that ensures the calls still connect.  It may seem even easier to type a web address into your computer’s browser and be whisked to your destination.  That’s a directory, too.  Easiest of all may be hitting the “send” button on an email.  Yes, that’s another directory service, whether ours or a competitor’s.

More recently, when mobile carriers want to roll out new services, like multi-media service (MMS) that allows photos and video to be sent via text message, it’s the directory that connects it – all over Internet Protocol networks.

There was a time when all of those actions would have seemed more like science fiction than a routine part of the business day.  That is the effect of frictionless innovation.  What a person can imagine can be built, deployed and endorsed more quickly than ever before.

What is most exciting is that the pace will only quicken.  As all networks become Internet Protocol networks, as consumers and companies demand more from their devices and service providers (think of the Cloud we hear so much about) and as the number of people with new ideas and the will to pursue them multiply, what does not seem possible today will be common tomorrow.

Here is just one small example that has found a home on one of our whiteboards.  Right now broadcast spectrum is a precious commodity.  Even so there is still television spectrum set-aside in one region to avoid interference with a station using the same spectrum in an adjacent market.

Directories, directories everywhere

Think of where I live in the Baltimore and Washington, D.C. corridor.  The NBC affiliate, Channel 4, in Washington, D.C. is assigned spectrum at the higher end of the band between 54 MHz and 72 MHz.  There is no Channel 4 in Baltimore, but there is a Channel 2, at the lower end of that spectrum segment.  As a result, there is no television interference, but that portion of the spectrum is only half used in each market.

Directory technologies can open up that unused spectrum for a host of services that work quite well adjacent to television.  What is now idle could be used to implement high-value, regionalized wireless broadband services.

Directory technology and the proliferation of Internet Protocol networks have combined to make it possible for new ideas to address new opportunities in new ways.  Call it “frictionless innovation”.

Ganek is chairman and CEO of Neustar, a Sterling, Va.-based company that provides clearinghouse and directory services to the Internet and communications industries.

How does one depict the complexity of the mess being presented as the national roll out plan of electronic health records (EHR) via the national health information network (N-HIN) using Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) designed by Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIOs), with the help of regional extension centers (RECs) without Standards (Standards) and with N too many vendors?

Class?  Ideas?  Class?

If this looks dumb, undo-able, unimplementable, uninteroperable–it’s because it is.  your vision is fine.

Remember the idea behind all this is to get your health record from point A to point B, any point B.  It’s that little word ‘any’ that turns the problem into a bit of a bugger.

Find yourself in the picture below, pic a dot, any dot (Point A).  Now, find your doctor, any doctor (Point B).  Now figure out how to get from A to B–it’s okay to use a pen on your monitor the help plot your course.   That was difficult. Now do it for every patient and every doctor in the country.

Now, do you really think the DC RHIO-NHIN plan will work?  If EHR were a Disney park, who’s playing the Mouse?

In May of this year I wrote about the problems of URLs for a given Twitter user’s profile, or for an individual post or “status” being different, depending the Twitter client in use. I suggested a new protocol for Twitter links. [You might want to read that, before the rest of this post]. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this simpler solution sooner!

The answer (in the short term) is to use a microformat (or a microformat-like “poshsformat”, if you prefer to call it that) for each case. Let’s say we use the classes twitter-user & twitter-status.

User-agents (that’s jargon for browsers) could then employ a script (such as those used by GreaseMonkey, or a Firefox extension) to ignore the encoded URL and substitute the equivalent for the user’s preferred Twitter client instead.

For links to user profiles:

<a
href="http://twitter.com/pigsonthewing">
Andy Mabbett
</a>

would become:

<a
class="twitter-user"
href= "http://twitter.com/pigsonthewing">
Andy Mabbett
</a>

and:

<a
href="http://accessibletwitter.com/app/user.php?uid=pigsonthewing">
Andy Mabbett</a>

would become:

<a
class="twitter-user"
href=" http://accessibletwitter.com/app/user.php?uid=pigsonthewing">
Andy Mabbett</a>

Likewise, for individual statuses:

<a
href="twitter.com/pigsonthewing/status/1828036334">
something witty</a>

would become:

<a
class="twitter-status"
href="twitter.com/pigsonthewing/status/1828036334">
something wittyg<a>

and:

<a
href="accessibletwitter.com/app/status.php?1828036334">
something witty<a>

would become:

<a
class="twitter-status"
href="accessibletwitter.com/app/status.php?1828036334">
something witty<a>

and:

<a
href="m.slandr.net/single.php?id=1828036334"
something witty</a>

would become:

<a
class="twitter-status"
href="m.slandr.net/single.php?id=1828036334">
something witty</a>

To simplify matters, the rules for extracting the user ID or the status update could be the same in both cases:

1. Parse the value of the href attribute of the element to which the class applies.
2. If there is a question mark, use everything after that.
3. Otherwise, if there is an equals sign, use everything after that.
4. Otherwise, use everything after the last slash.

That would deal with all the examples in my earlier post.

So, if you’re using a user-agent which is aware of this microformat, and find on a page:

<a
class="twitter-user"
href="http://twitter.com/pigsonthewing">
Andy Mabbett<a>
said
<a
class="twitter-status"
href="m.slandr.net/single.php?id=1828036334">
something witty<a>

but your preferred Twitter client is Dabr (one I recommend, BTW!) then your browser would treat (and possibly render) that as:

<a
href="dabr.co.uk/user/pigsonthewing">
Andy Mabbett<a>
said
<a
class="twitter-status"
href="dabr.co.uk/status/1828036334">
something witty<a>

Simples!

Tim O'Reilly, Ray Ozzie

Tim O’Reilly created a bit of a stir last night in the tech world by writing a thoughtful essay entitled “The War for the Web.” He’ll be expanding on his thoughts in his keynote address today at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York. From the essay, here’s the core argument:

“[W]e’ve grown used to a world with one dominant search engine, one dominant online encyclopedia, one dominant online retailer, one dominant auction site, one dominant online classified site, and we’ve been readying ourselves for one dominant social network. But what happens when a company with one of these natural monopolies uses it to gain dominance in other, adjacent areas? I’ve been watching with a mixture of admiration and alarm as Google has taken their dominance in search and used it to take control of other, adjacent data-driven applications.

It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we’ll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we’ve enjoyed for the past two decades. But I’m betting that things are going to get ugly. We’re heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform. [emphasis added] Instead, we’re facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.

… P.S. One prediction: Microsoft will emerge as a champion of the open web platform, supporting interoperable web services from many independent players, much as IBM emerged as the leading enterprise backer of Linux.

The coda there, with the Microsoft prediction, is what fascinated me – so much so that I mentioned it on Twitter. Tim immmediately responded, “Thanks. I should write a followup explaining the logic that got me to the PS.”  While we wait for that, though, here’s my prediction – with a bit of inside knowledge – today Microsoft begins to live up to Tim’s expectations with several announcements at our Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2009 in Los Angeles.

If you want to see the future of Microsoft, and the future of the web and computing as we see it, watch live as Ray Ozzie lays it out in his keynote address, streamed live today at 11:30 eastern time, 8:30 am Pacific, over at http://microsoftpdc.com/.

Oh – and if your Latin is rusty, my title above comes from the phrase ”Si vis pacem, para bellum” – the classic doctrine of maintaining peace & deterring war by being better armed and prepared. It is generally attributed to Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, a fourth-century AD Roman military scholar whom I consider the Sun Tzu of the West. I’ve known many fans of his philosophy in the Pentagon.

Now it may turn out that, whether they know it or not, Microsoft techies are building new ways to avoid a war on the open web. As Sun Tzu wrote,  ”To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue an enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.” Watch our PDC this week to see examples of what I consider the modern technological acme of skill.

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Oracle’s Mike Freedman, the spec lead for JSR 301: Portlet 1.0 Bridge for JavaServer Faces 1.2 and JSR 329: Portlet 2.0 Bridge for JavaServer Faces 1.2 gives two presentations at the JSF Summit, in Orlando, FL.

Here are the abstracts:

Did you know that your JSF application is also a portlet?

The Portlet Bridge (JSR 301 or JSR 329) provides a Faces compatible runtime environment in a Java portlet environment enabling a JSF application to simultaneously be published as a web application and a portlet. This talk introduces you to the Portlet Bridge and shows you how to use it in your applications. Demonstrations are provided to illustrate concepts. Topics covered include:

• The difference between JSR 301 and JSR 329.
• Extending a Faces application so it also runs as a portlet.
• An overview of the bridge’s configuration flexibility to adapt to differing Faces and application environments.

The Portlet Bridge and the 2.0s

In the recent past both Java Portlets and JSF have published their 2.0 versions. This talk introduces you to how the major new features in each of these 2.0s are managed by the bridge. The Portlet Bridge provides a Faces compatible runtime environment in a Java portlet environment enabling a JSF application to simultaneously be published as a web application and a portlet. As a technology that sits between two others (the Java Portlet API and Faces), its capabilities expand as the controlling technologies are revised. Demonstrations are provided to illustrate concepts. Topics covered include:

• Portlet 2.0 shared render parameters
• Portlet 2.0 eventing
• Portlet 2.0 resource serving
• JSF 2.0 Ajax support

Interesting post drove my attention yesterday. Reading about the role of PLM as enterprise backbone, I wanted to raise a question – how many of such “e-bones” do we need? My experience shows that in every enterprise implementation, discussion magically came to the point of “what will serve as a company/organization/product/enterprise or whatever else backbone. And I have to say, that I always got mixed feeling about that. I will try to put my pros and cons in the way enterprise systems can be organized to serve product lifecycle and enterprise resource planning needs.

1. One vs. Many
Thinking about a dream situation when all systems in enterprise will be magically synchronized around a single system (or bone), I came to the conclusion that we need to keep it as a dream. However, practical approach, in my view shows that enterprise organization will continue to have multiple systems serving their needs.

2. Enterprise Platforms
The interoperability between enterprise systems is killing enterprise organizations. Company’s IT is normally trying to develop their strategies around various platforms, but even so, they can rarely reduce the amount of systems and functional needs drive to additional system deployment.

3. Master Data Record
This is another place where “discussion” between enterprise systems becomes critical. Who is controling data and serve as a master? The data synchronization is an expensive. However, decision about master data control comes again and again with each next step of enterprise system development on the functional level.

4. Role of SaaS
In my view, cloud services (or SaaS, if you will) is playing disruptive, but positive role in discussion related to enterprise architecture and various “enterprise bones”. The disruptive role of SaaS is to show to the organization, the reality of no-single system controlling all data and processes in enterprise.

I’m interested to discuss and listen about your experience? What is your opinion on that?
Best, Oleg

The French Interoperability Framework RGI 1.0 is out and officially enacted.

Here is the readers digest quote from an interoperability specialist’s rant about the French paper:

- the document is of poor quality. By this I mean that you do not expect this kind of document stemming from a french central administration: a few spellchecking errors, low level of technical discourse matched with european jargon.
…
- an attention to details that is simply ridiculous: it describes the SMTP and TCP/IP protocols in details and then set as a Rule that they should be used. (Thanks to the document we can now feel safe and righteous when we use TCP/IP to surf the Internet).
…
- Lots of factual errors and inaccuracies: times new roman is not a font that can be used free of any right.
- comparing apples and bananas: The only difference between REST architectures and SOAs is not that the SOAs are not REST (although we understand they’re trying to describe two kinds of “web services” it is wildly inaccurate and creates a senseless chatter).

… and so forth. The simple question to ask is, like it or not, what does the Sarkozy government want to achieve with its French interoperability framework RGI? What is the practical purpose of their RGI? I have no answer for this question prepared. It only makes much sense to me to enact it while Malmö quarrels over the European Interoperability Framework 2.0 and the degrees of openness needed for interoperability. If administration hasn’t made up its mind about its national interests in the matter it is no surprise that the contents of the document becomes coton.

Federated Portals Guide – WSRP Interoperability with the WebCenter Framework: This is a very useful part of the WLP documentation discussing the steps you need to take to consume WSRP 2.0 portlets, including the WebCenter Social Computing Services exposed as portlets.

Topics covered:

• Installing the Patch Set
• Consuming WLP Portlets in WebCenter Framework and Oracle Portal Applications
• Consuming WebCenter Framework Portlets in WebLogic Portal
• Configuring Security
• Interportlet Communication Considerations
• Consuming Oracle ADF Faces Rich Client Component Portlets

Nov.19 – Fujitsu and Fujitsu Lab. propose “Open Cloud Standards Incubator” to “Distributed Management Task Force（DMTF）” .  Open Cloud Standards Incubato will be a working group in that body, and will handle the interoperability of cloud computing with 37 members.

J <http://www.itmedia.co.jp/enterprise/articles/0911/19/news048.html>