This is Draft 2.0 of The Open Group's SOA ontology. This draft is being exposed for comment outside The Open Group prior to formal Open Group company review. Interested parties are invited to sent comments, and those comments will be addressed in the version submitted to formal review by The Open Group.

It is the infrastructural paradigm shift that is sweeping across the Enterprise IT world, but how is it best defined? I refer of course to 'Cloud Computing' - the phenomenon that currently has as many definitions as there are squares on a chess-board. To try and narrow it down we bring here a round-up of some recent attempts to bring welcome precision where there risks being unnecessary vagueness. Enjoy!

Legal Information Institute ("LII") founder and director Thomas R. Bruce has begun an excellent series of blog articles on the vital role of intererability in the provision of free legal information to the world, "hacking eGovernment" as he puts it. For those who do not know of him, Mr. Bruce is a giant in the movement to make government information available to everyone. LII is headquartered at the Cornell University School of Law and has international branches. Mr. Bruce's series is one to watch for those pondering the future of hacking eGovernment.

Amid all the screeching in the last post, it’s a little hard to figure out what the point was. So I’ll just say it: folks, the future does not lie in putting up huge, centralized collections of caselaw . It lies in building services that can work across many individual collections put up by lots of different people in lots of different institutional settings. Let me say that again: the future does not lie in putting up huge, centralized collections of caselaw. It lies in building services that can work across many individual collections put up by lots of different people in lots of different institutional settings. Services like site-spanning searches, comprehensive current-awareness services, and a scad of interesting mashups in which we put caselaw, statutes and regulations alongside other stuff to make new stuff.

Read more.

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has obtained a broad patent for a data center in a container, which might put a kink in product plans for companies like Sun Microsystems (NSDQ: JAVA), Rackable Systems, and IBM (NYSE: IBM). The patent, granted Tuesday, covers "modular data centers with modular components that can implemented in numerous ways, including as a process, an apparatus, a system, a device, or a method."

The U.S. Patent Trademark Office site reveals patent number 7,278,273 as describing modules in intermodal shipping containers, or those that can be shipped by multiple carriers and systems. It also covers computing systems mounted within temperature-controlled containers, configured so they can ship easily, be factory built and deployed at data center sites.

If this sounds familiar, it might just be. Google's patent description resembles Sun Microsystems' data center in a box, called Project Blackbox. During its debut last year, Sun installed a Blackbox -- essentially a cargo container for 18-wheelers -- outside of Grand Central Station in New York City to show how easily one of their data centers could be installed. Google's patent description also has similarities to Rackable Systems' ICE Cube as well as IBM's Scalable Modular Data Center.

Sun Modular Datacenter S20, widely known as Project Blackbox, is revolutionizing how companies, universities, and governments add datacenter capacity. With its high-density, eco-friendly design that enables rapid deployment, game-changing economics, and unimaginable mobility, Sun Modular Datacenter is reaching new customers world-wide who have been waiting for just this type of break-through solution.

00 meters under the ground in Japan, Sun along with ten other IT firms are building a datacenter. The datacenter is located at such a low depth to take advantage of the cooler air as a means of bringing the 40% of energy usage, for cooling, down a few notches. The datacenter will also be reluctant to Japan’s earthquake potential by being built on the solid bedrock floor of the crater hollowed out for the project.

In the underground pictures it is clear that the Sun Modular Datacenter 20 is going to be a successful format for the datacenter because it is self contained and there is an abundant resource of ground water in the cave for a cooling system. The data center will be used by government agencies, it will serve as a service center for IT clients, and it will be used by businesses.

The Sun MD 20 Sun is included the design of this datacenter. In the earthquake analysis, the prototype was placed on a large shake table in California, and put through a simulation of the Northridge earthquake of 1993. The results were very conclusive. The location of Japan’s underground datacenter is still undisclosed. More Information

To run Sun’s award-winning data centers, a modular design containing many "pods" was implemented to save power and time. The modular design aids the building of any sized datacenter. Inside of each pod, there are 24 racks. Each of these 24 racks has a common cooling system as does every other modular building block. The number of pods is limited by the size of the datacenters. Large and small datacenters can benefit from using the pod approach. The module design makes it easy to configure a datacenter to meet a client's requirements. As the datacenter grows over time, adding pods is convenient. The module and pod designs make it easy to adapt to new technology such as blade servers. Some of the ways that Sun’s datacenter modules are designed with the future in mind are as follows:

To run Sun’s award-winning data centers, a modular design containing many "pods" was implemented to save power and time. The modular design aids the building of any sized datacenter. Inside of each pod, there are 24 racks. Each of these 24 racks has a common cooling system as does every other modular building block. The number of pods is limited by the size of the datacenters. Large and small datacenters can benefit from using the pod approach. The module design makes it easy to configure a datacenter to meet a client's requirements. As the datacenter grows over time, adding pods is convenient. The module and pod designs make it easy to adapt to new technology such as blade servers.

An updated 58-page Sun BluePrint covers Sun's approach to designing datacenters. (Authors - Dean Nelson, Michael Ryan, Serena DeVito, Ramesh KV, Petr Vlasaty, Brett Rucker, and Brian Day): ENERGY EFFICIENT DATACENTERS: THE ROLE OF MODULARITY IN DATACENTER DESIGN. More Information Sun saves $1 million/year with new datacenter Take a Virtual Tour

Summary: This book is about composite applications and how they can be developed as OBAs using the 2007 Microsoft Office System. It provides an overview of the technologies available in the 2007 Microsoft Office System, and gives several examples from various industries to build OBAs using composition at the presentation, business-logic, and data layers. This book is meant for solution architects, industry architects, or senior developers who are designing, developing, and deploying composite applications. (97 total printed pages)

Service orientation addresses these challenges by centering on rapidly evolving XML and Web services standards that are revolutionizing how developers compose systems and integrate them over distributed networks. No longer are developers forced to make do with rigid and proprietary languages and object models that used to be the norm before service orientation came into play. The emergence of this new methodology is helping to develop new approaches specifically for Web-based distributed computing. This revolution is transforming the business by integrating disparate systems to establish a real-time enterprise. Making information available where it is needed to simplify merchandising processes requires a methodology that is based on loosely coupled integration between various in-store and back-end applications. This demand makes it critical for an architecture that is based on service orientation for integration between disparate applications. In addition, surfacing information at the right place requires the ability to compose dynamic applications using an array of underlying services. The Office Business Applications platform provides this ability to create composite applications, such as dashboards for the store, regional, and corporate managers.

Adobe Systems Google Inc.* IBM Intel Corporation Microsoft Corporation Novell* Sun Microsystems

For many years, Java and web developers alike have had to explain to the unwitting that JavaScript had absolutely nothing to do with Java. It was one of the great marketing gaffes of the mid-90s. They were no more alike than chalk and cheese. But in the last six months, I've had to lay down my placard and walk away from the picket line with a smile on my face and a skip in my step. Finally Java has been put into JavaScript.

The use of conformity assessment as a means by which buyers and sellers can communicate requirements will increase as information technology systems and applications grow more complex. Models for conformance testing and certification programs are necessary to understand principles and issues that are essential for successful conformity assessment programs. This paper presents one such model by identifying key roles, activities and products involved in any conformance testing and certification program. This model has been successfully used by NIST in helping private-sector organizations establish their certification programs.

This document analyzes how design decisions of a specification's conformance model may affect its implementability and the interoperability of its implementations. To do so, it introduces the concept of variability - how much implementations conforming to a given specification may vary among themselves - and presents a set of well-known dimensions of variability. Its goal is to raise awareness of the potential cost that some benign-looking decisions may have on interoperability and to provide guidance on how to avoid these pitfalls by better understanding the mechanisms induced by variability.

The upcoming Firefox 3.0 release has built-in support for microformats in the form of an API that you can access from a Firefox extension. In this tip, you follow a simple example of how to use this API from within your extension code. You take a skeleton Hello World extension and give it the ability to store an hCard from any Web page and then use that stored hCard to populate a Web form.

The good folks over at the Gartner Group have revealed the top 10 technologies that they believe will change the world over the next four years:Multicore and hybrid processorsVirtualization and fabric computingSocial networks and social softwareCloud computing and cloud/Web platformsWeb mashupsUser InterfaceUbiquitous computingContextual computingAugmented realitySemantics

Members Approve Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) 2.0 as OASIS Standard IBM, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, SAP, TIBCO, Vignette and Others Collaborate on Open Standard for Integrating Web Services into Portals

Boston, MA, USA; 30 May 2008 — OASIS, the international open standards consortium, today announced that its members have approved the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) version 2.0 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. Developed through an open process by the OASIS WSRP Technical Committee, the new standard simplifies the effort required for aggregating applications, such as portals, to quickly integrate remote content and applications. "Vendors of aggregating applications no longer need to write special adapters to accommodate the variety of interfaces and protocols used by content providers," explained Rich Thompson of IBM, chair of the OASIS WSRP Technical Committee. "With WSRP, they can integrate remote content and applications with just a few mouse clicks and virtually no programming effort. WSRP version 2.0 adds those capabilities needed to fully integrate the remote components into the aggregated application."

Kabak Y., Dogac A. A Survey and Analysis of Electronic Business Document Standards Under revision.

The amount of work it takes to "offline enable" a Web application is roughly similar to the amount of work it takes to "online enable" a desktop application.

I suspect this is the bitter truth that answers the questions asked in articles like  The Frustratingly Unfulfilled Promise of Google Gears where the author laments the lack of proliferation of offline Web applications built on Google Gears. When it first shipped I was looking forward to a platform like Google Gears but after I thought about the problem for a while, I realized that such a platform would be just as useful for "online enabling" desktop applications as it would be for "offline enabling" Web applications. Additionally, I came to the conclusion that the former is a lot more enabling to users than the latter. This is when I started becoming interested in Live Mesh as a Platform, this is one area where I think Microsoft's hearts and minds are in the right place. I want to see more applications like Outlook + RPC over HTTP  not "offline enabled" versions of Outlook Web Access.

I don't think the Atom publishing protocol can be considered the universal protocol for talking to remote databases given that cloud storage vendors like Amazon and database vendors like Oracle don't support it yet. That said, this is definitely a positive trend. Back in the RSS vs. Atom days I used to get frustrated that people were spending so much time reinventing the wheel with an RSS clone when the real gaping hole in the infrastructure was a standard editing protocol. It took a little longer than I expected (Sam Ruby started talking about in 2003) but the effort has succeeded way beyond my wildest dreams. All I wanted was a standard editing protocol for blogs and content management systems and we've gotten so much more.

Microsoft is using AtomPub as the interface to a wide breadth of services and products as George Moore points out in his post A Unified Standards-Based Protocols and Tooling Platform for Storage from Microsoft 

And a few weeks after George's post even more was revealed in posts such as this one about  FeedSync and Live Mesh where we find out Congratulations to the Live Mesh team, who announced their Live Mesh Technology Preview release earlier this evening! Amit Mital gives a detailed overview in this post on http://dev.live.com. You can read all about it in the usual places...so why do I mention it here? FeedSync is one of the core parts of the Live Mesh platform. One of the key values of Live Mesh is that your data flows to all of your devices. And rather than being hidden away in a single service, any properly authenticated user has full bidirectional sync capability. As I discussed in the Introduction to FeedSync, this really makes "your stuff yours". Okay, FeedSync isn't really AtomPub but it does use the Atom syndication format so I count that as a win for Atom+APP as well. As time goes on, I hope we'll see even more products and services that support Atom and AtomPub from Microsoft. Standardization at the protocol layer means we can move innovation up the stack.