Group items tagged

1. U.S. and European antitrust cases put lawyers and non-technologists in charge of important final product decisions.

The company long resisted releasing pertinent interoperability information in the United States. On the European Continent, this resistance led to huge fines. Meanwhile, Microsoft steered away from exclusive contracts and from pushing into adjacent markets.

We intend for this site to be a central location for information on how to move your data in and out of Google products. Welcome.The Data Liberation FrontThe Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products.  We do this because we believe that you should be able to export any data that you create in (or import into) a product.  We help and consult other engineering teams within Google on how to "liberate" their products.  This is our mission statement:Users should be able to control the data they store inany of Google's products. Our team's goal is tomake it easier for them to move data in and out.

The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) has just announced that it has completed its mission and will betransitioning all further efforts to OASIS. As their recent press release states: The release of WS-I member approved final materials for Basic Profile (BP) 1.2 and 2.0, and Reliable Secure Profile (RSP) 1.0 fulfills WS-I’s last milestone as an organization. By publishing the final three profiles, WS-I marks the completion of its work. Stewardship over WS-I’s assets, operations and mission will transition to OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), a group of technology vendors and customers that drive development and adoption of open standards. Now at any other time this kind of statement from a standards organization might pass without much comment. However, with the rise of REST, a range of non-WS approaches to SOA and the fact that most of the WS-* standards have not been covered by WS-I, is this a reflection of the new position Web Services finds itself in, over a decade after it began? Perhaps this was inevitable given that the over the past few years there has been a lot more emphasis on interoperability within the various WS-* working groups? Or are the days of interactions across heterogeneous SOAP implementations in the past?

So the question remains: has interoperability pretty much been achieved for WS-* through WS-I and the improvements made with the way in which the specifications and standards are developed today, or has the real interoperability challenge moved elsewhere, still to be addressed?

EU governments should use open standards and interoperable systems to deliver electronic government services, EU ministers and the European Commission agreed earlier this week. They also stated they would promote the reuse of public sector information. The ministers declared to "embed innovation and cost effectiveness into eGovernment through the systematic promotion of open standards and interoperable systems, development of EU wide e-authentication schemes and proactive development of e-invoicing, e-procurement and pre-commercial procurement."It was one of 29 points agreed upon during a meeting of all ministers responsible for information society from European member states and the European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda.

Open standards are an important element in many open source applications, as these are freely accessible. Development of this type of software can run into problems when using closed standards or when using standards that require payment of royalties. Such standards may change unexpectedly or limit how the software can be used.

Granada declaration (pdf)

On October 06, 2008, OASIS issued a public call for participation in a new technical committee chartered to define specifications for use of Web services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable information sharing across content management repositories from different vendors. The OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) TC will build upon existing specifications to "define a domain model and bindings that are designed to be layered on top of existing Content Management systems and their existing programmatic interfaces. The TC will not prescribe how specific features should be implemented within those Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. Rather it will seek to define a generic/universal set of capabilities provided by an ECM system and a set of services for working with those capabilities." As of February 17, 2010, the CMIS technical work had received broad support through TC participation, industry analyst opinion, and declarations of interest from major companies. Some of these include Adobe, Adullact, AIIM, Alfresco, Amdocs, Anakeen, ASG Software Solutions, Booz Allen Hamilton, Capgemini, Citytech, Content Technologies, Day Software, dotCMS, Ektron, EMC, EntropySoft, ESoCE-NET, Exalead, FatWire, Fidelity, Flatirons, fme AG, Genus Technologies, Greenbytes GmbH, Harris, IBM, ISIS Papyrus, KnowledgeTree, Lexmark, Liferay, Magnolia, Mekon, Microsoft, Middle East Technical University, Nuxeo, Open Text, Oracle, Pearson, Quark, RSD, SAP, Saperion, Structured Software Systems (3SL), Sun Microsystems, Tanner AG, TIBCO Software, Vamosa, Vignette, and WeWebU Software. Early commentary from industry analysts and software engineers is positive about the value proposition in standardizing an enterprise content-centric management specification. The OASIS announcement of November 17, 2008 includes endorsements. Principal use cases motivating the CMIS technical work include collaborative content applications, portals leveraging content management repositories, mashups, and searching a content repository.

NIEM enables information sharing, focusing on information exchanged among organizations as part of their current or intended business practices. The NIEM exchange development methodology results in a common semantic understanding among participating organizations and data formatted in a semantically consistent manner. NIEM will standardize content (actual data exchange standards), provide tools, and managed processes. NIEM builds on the demonstrated success of the Global Justice XML Data Model. Stakeholders from relevant communities work together to define critical exchanges, leveraging the successful work of the GJXDM.