[sc34wg3] WG3 Focus

Wed Nov 2 08:53:21 EDT 2011

Graham,

Just one point of clarification:

Do you want to discuss SDShare as a goal for WG3?

;-)

I have the new NP form and hope to have it completed before Friday.

Too late to discuss this week but how to proceed with an NP on SDShare 
could be on the agenda for the following WG3 conference call.

Hope you are having a great week!

Patrick

PS: Thanks for using SDShare as an example. I think there is some room 
for innovation in WG3 but having some low cost, high visibility wins 
based on almost off the shelf technology would be nice as well.

Not a fully formed idea but is there a comparison to commodity computers 
and what we need to do in the semantic space? You can have your Cray-8 
or whatever they are up to now or you can have 10,000 $500 commodity 
boxes. Something to think about.

On 11/02/2011 03:16 AM, Graham Moore wrote:
> Morning Patrick, All
>
> My contribution for Friday:
>
> SDShare really should be completed and for me things like SDShare are
> the kind of standardisation work that WG3 should focus on. Below I
> breakdown SDShare into several general aspects that I think could
> inform the work that WG3 does.
>
>
> Use of Existing Standards
> --------------------------------------
> There are lots of standard out there and creating new ones just adds
> to the pile. However, reusing, incorporating and referencing existing
> ones strengthens both the new standard and helps to focus adoption of
> the others. The incentive to organisations to adopt a given standard
> increases if the number of general uses it has it bigger.
>
> SDShare uses the ATOM, RDF and XTM, standards to deliver its value. It
> didn't reinvent new semantic formats, or payload formats, it used what
> was there.
>
> Small Amount of Innovation
> ---------------------------------------
>
> In WG3 we tend to invent rather than standardise and this raises the
> question why are these invention activities are happening in a
> standards body? I'm not necessarily against this invention aspect, as
> the WG brings together lots of smart people and that should result in
> something good. Part of the problem with this in the past, HyTime,
> Topic Maps, is that these are BIG things and the lots of smart people
> have lots of different ways and ideas on how to invent these things
> big things. As they are inventions rather than standardisation there
> is no real deployments to reference, and no communities of practice to
> unite. This sometimes :) leads to quite differing positions, which are
> hard to resolve and slow down / prevent us finishing work.
>
> SDShare came together originally in a CEN standards workshop and even
> with its limited goals, sharing semantic descriptions / metadata
> between government agencies, we had 'tough' technical discussions over
> things such as SOAP versus REST. But these were resolvable issues not
> fundamental disagreements or intractable positions. SDShare is limited
> in newness, but I think it has just enough newness to make it exciting
> and shiny. It glues together well known and 'mature' standards to
> deliver value, to provide guidance and address real issues.
>
> So perhaps in general WG3's innovation should be about how to we reach
> some of the goals that Steve N talked about by adding the bit of WG3
> smarts to things that are out there. Inventing just enough to empower
> a new community, inspire a new generation of developers, provide clear
> guidance on how stuff can work together.
>
>
> Clear Business and User Value Proposition
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Topic Maps, RDF, HyTime, SGML, XML. Yep they all have business value,
> but in general its not immediatley clear to many people (managers,
> organisations, developers, bob on the street). I'm not saying WG3
> should ignore the larger problems that need more meta solutions, but
> that we can do a lot of good by addressing things lower down the
> complexity order.
>
> SDShare started out focused on Government Agencies and how they share
> data across boudaries. It dealt with the political issues that people
> don't want to share access to their underlying systems, nor do they
> want to cede control of their data into another silo. It was aimed at
> offering an alternative to copying and siloisation of EU data,
> reducing costs. Now, its starting to get traction in large
> mutli-national organisations who internally have many of the same
> political and technical issues.
>
> SDShare is a meta-technology but started out with some fairly well
> focused, middle ground, goals. What I mean by this is that we didn't
> focus on one government agency with one problem and fix it, we tried
> to understand the space and come up with a generalised solution. But
> we didn't focus on how to allow any system of metadata to talk to any
> other system of metadata.
>
> Clear Standardisation Value
> -----------------------------------------
>
> There needs to be communities that will benefit from the
> standardisation of something. There will always be some people who
> benefit from invention, but to benefit from standardisation is
> different. Adoption of a standard increases the fluidity, speed and
> accurrancy with which organisations through the systems they have in
> place can communicate. I think this goes a long way to meeting some of
> SteveN's goals.
>
> Easy / Concrete Enough To Implement
> ----------------------------------------------
>
> SDShare has traction as there are lots of tools out there to deal with
> ATOM, RDF and XTM and the extra bit can be implemented quickly by most
> developers. WG3 should consider the burden in places on developers and
> implementors with the work it produces. Some things are simply
> complicated and cannot be reduced, but maybe through better packaging,
> by considering who will implement standards we can help increase
> adoption.
>
> Mindshare with the Developers
> --------------------------------------------
>
> Still today you say triple or generic object or SPARQL / TMQL to the
> average developer on the street and they look back blankly. The world
> of information and information management is controlled by the Java,
> Python, .NET developers of this world. They do not think in terms of
> information, concepts, subjects, they think in terms of UI, web
> services, functions and classes. RDF has marginally better mindshare
> than Topic Maps, but not really much. OData (Microsofts Open Data
> Standard), which is a nicely written standard, uses ATOM, REST URI
> etc, but not a very good Open Data one.) is already getting more / has
> the same traction as RDF / Topic Maps. Why? I don't buy that its just
> becuase Microsoft are pushing it, yes it is in SharePoint, yes there
> is an Excel plug-in for it, yes there are Visual Studio tools for it.
> All of these developement things could have been done by a
> non-microsoft company. No, the key thing is that the deveopers have
> been embraced. The tools are not alien, the concepts are an evolution
> of what they know and understand.
>
> Although we are dealing with information management in WG3 the people
> who build the systems are developers and architects and to get
> adoption of these standards we should be embracing and extending how
> they work, much as we should reuse and add the magic dust to existing
> standards and best practice.
>
>
> Principled Approach or Why this way?
> -------------------------------------------------------
>
> There are many ways to solve a problem and part of what WG3 should be
> focused on is using experience and insight to put together standards
> that embody the wider way we see things. For example, SDShare problems
> could be solved by installing a monster IBM or Microsoft Message Queue
> system. Why don't we do that? Well SDShare embodies openess, any
> client can ask what has changed, all resource representations are URL
> addressable, new clients can be added and join the game with minimal
> overhead. The message formats are not proprietary, the messages can be
> processed by many different tools of many platforms.
>
> We embodied our values of openess and transparency in the way we put
> together the standard. WG3 standards will get adoption firstly if they
> help communities and orgisations but also because of the inherent
> values they exude. Adopters of WG3 standards believe in what we
> believe.
>
>
> On 2 November 2011 00:55, Patrick Durusau<patrick at durusau.net>  wrote:
>> Greetings!
>>
>> In case you hadn't noticed, today is 1 November. Which by my calendar means
>> that this coming Friday is the 4th of November.
>>
>> We are scheduled to have a WG3 meeting on Friday and I am going to send out
>> the teleconference details tomorrow.
>>
>> Just wanted to give anyone who is typing furiously a little nudge about
>> typing even faster. ;-) Marks are not taken off for typos.
>>
>> BTW, I deeply appreciated the submissions made thus far (Steve N. and
>> Michel) but also look forward to additional submissions.
>>
>> Hope everyone is having a great week!
>>
>> Patrick
>>
>> --
>> Patrick Durusau
>> patrick at durusau.net
>> Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
>> Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
>> Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
>> Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)
>>
>> Another Word For It (blog): http://tm.durusau.net
>> Homepage: http://www.durusau.net
>> Twitter: patrickDurusau
>> _______________________________________________
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>> topicmapmail at infoloom.com
>> http://www.infoloom.com/mailman/listinfo/topicmapmail
>>
>
>

-- 
Patrick Durusau
patrick at durusau.net
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)

Another Word For It (blog): http://tm.durusau.net
Homepage: http://www.durusau.net
Twitter: patrickDurusau