Conmergence

Thomas Erl Sends a Pointer to the Public SOA Design Patterns Review

<ed.note>Thomas writes:

Just wanted to let you know that a galley of the new soa design patterns book is being sent out to you. The design patterns are also published at www.soapatterns.org as part of an public, industry-wide review. Please refer any of your colleagues to this site that may also be interested in participating.

Best,

Thomas

Ed. - There is much more content at the site but I provide a snippet below:</ed.note>

From the site:

NOTE: The following content is part of an industry-wide SOA design patterns review that is being carried out until January 31, 2008. This content is still subject to change and is scheduled to be finalized by March, 2008.

The Public SOA Design Patterns Review

This site is currently dedicated to a public review of 60 design patterns from the upcoming book "SOA Design Patterns" by Thomas Erl.

The author is collecting feedback, opions, contributions, and validation from professionals and practioners from around the world in order to finalize the manuscript for a scheduled publication in March, 2008.

SOAPatterns.org will subsequently remain a community resource site, containing revised, concise descriptions of all SOA design patterns and allowing for new design patterns to be published and reviewed on an on-going basis.

15th Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference, July 23-25, Austin, TX

Agenda here.

SOA|UDEF Workshop, June 15 from 9.00am - 1.00pm EST

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is critical in a multi-enterprise healthcare ecosystem. Open Group has a major workgroup going on in SOA and Symantic Interoperability to address this issue. Most of our vendor/partners such as SAP, IBM, HP, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco etc have not only become members of the Open Group but are pursuing SOA roadmaps. We are also asking all our vendors/partners to look into the UDEF Vendor Challenge for integrating the Stevens Academic Prototype on Diabetes - Remote Health/Blood Monitoring, Personalized Medicine and Electronic Medical Records with the National Health Information Network. For more details of the UDEF Vendor Challenge Click Here

The JJAPF Education Track is organizing a 1/2 day SOA workshop on Universal Data Element Framework on June 15 from 9.00am - 1.00pm EST. Webconferencing/location details are enclosed. Ron Shuldt, Chair Open Group/UDEF Project will be providing the instruction and several of our vendors/partners from the Open Group will also be attending this session.

UDEF is very similiar to the J&J meta-data stds (both have the origins in the same ISO stds). United Nations is using this and Homeland Security/Dept of Defence are looking at it. This is language/industry agnostic and can provide a consistent naming/numbering/indexing mechanism from Proforma artifacts to records/document management and can scale to the molecular level for chemicals/blood (eg could be aliased for the JNJ numbering scheme being used by ABCD in PRD)

The SOA/UDEF Training material will be presented live to allow for the students to interact with the UDEF trees that are viewable at http://www.opengroup.org/udefinfo/defs.htm . This can be currently downloaded as an Excel Spreadsheet at https://www.opengroup.org/projects/udef/protected/doc.tpl?gdid=13437

The first 90 minutes of the training will cover the key principles for selecting the correct property and the correct object. Specific examples on HR & Procurement will also be covered. The interactive session (about 90 minutes) that follows will provides the students with exercises that test some of the principles that they heard in the first 90 minutes. The UDEF mapping done during the Stevens Diabetes Prototype will be also demonstrated as an opportunity for future integration with the National Health Information Network.

We look forward to participation from our global community and especially the TOGAF/ITIL Trained/Certified members and the SOA Interest Workgroup. Please forward to others in your organization as well as your Open Group vendor/partners as appropriate.

Thank you,
JJAPF Education Track

SOA Forgot the Data: Composite Data Services and Data Governance

Ash Parikh and his colleagues Ajay Ramachandran, Premal Parikh, Bob Albo, and Murty Gurajada of the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo Best of Show Awards Finalist firm RainingData authored this "introduction to composite data services, a powerful framework in combination with XML data management, SOA registries and repositories."

Outsourcing the C-Suite [ Tweaked and reposted -- was: Ralph Szygenda believes that the high-tech industry can learn from the auto industry ]

<ed.note>The services and support industry no longer requires an overpaid, iddatarate management strata -- since it can easily be replaced by a webbed database, wiki or now, finally, outsourced. Shareholders, especially with the rise of "activists" coupled with the blogosphere, will get wise “that globalization hasn't gone far enough.” This is because there is no sphere in business to which Szygenda's "standards" do not apply and those standards lead to automation and outsourcing and real-time accountability ( interoperancy ) on a cost per unit basis. Adoption of service oriented architecture, the rise of financial services straight thru processing, and the push for transparent open book management is set to ignite a very interesting class war. Though the new money provided by increased productivity ( read: IT employees, whose data aggregation and process re-engineering produced the value ) produced has gone straight to "C" bonuses, rather than employees or stockholders, "C's" still feel a need to pull stuff like this and this.</ed.note>

A standard SOA paradox

Adam Michelson, guest commentary, http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com

What would service-oriented architecture be without standards? Not much. But is it any better off with the large number of SOA standards that exist? Java and the Java EE are feeling the backlash of a specification that is too complex with too many standards, as simpler scripting languages are making ground. SOA will suffer the same backlash if the number of SOA standards and specifications continues to grow in number and complexity. We already see the emergence of very simple REST Web services as IT professionals look for clarity through the morass of SOA standards. Simplicity is the pathway to adoption.

It is not easy to stem the tide of the creation of SOA standards. Many times the creation and support for standards is political, with certain standards backed by software vendors that have their own agenda. The standards that survive give their creators leverage, so the result is no shortage of standards being created and trying to be the fittest. Given the proliferation of SOA standards, there is an opportunity to take a step back and provide some perspective on all the SOA standards that exist. That is the purpose of this series of articles.

We will explore the key SOA standards and try to identify which are likely to be adopted. Unfortunately this is not an easy task. Identifying only the most popular standards is not a popular thing to do as there will be a few that may feel snubbed for not being included. But there are so many SOA standards that exist and they are changing constantly, so discussing them all is practically impossible. The different versions of all the standards compound the complexity. This article still lists almost 70 individual standards, way too many for the average IT worker to be expected to keep abreast of.

"Shared Vocabulary" in SOA

"Horizontal Future" by Peter A. Buxbaum, military-information-technology.com

What used to be known by the arcane terms of data taxonomy and ontology is now referred to as a “shared vocabulary,” according to Ken Pratt, chief architect at McDonald Bradley, which was the lead contractor on the horizontal fusion portfolio.

“Different organizations have different ways of describing information,” Pratt explained. “There must be 17 different ways to refer to an M-1 Abrams tank or an IED. By developing a shared vocabulary, communities of interest are able to describe the same thing in the same way.” This increases the relevance and reliability of data searches.

“We have long been proponents of paying attention to the data,” added Ken Bartee, chief executive officer of McDonald Bradley. “The network-centric strategy has little value to the warfighter in the field if the data layer is not usable.”

McDonald Bradley has brought 40 different defense data sources online, according to Bartee, who added, “But there are thousands are out there that are not online yet.”

Developing communities of interest involves bringing together different defense agencies that all deal with the same function or process, noted John Sutton, McDonald Bradley’s senior vice president for the Advanced Programs Group. Communities of interest can be of wide applicability, such as logistics or meteorology, or represent narrower areas as strike warfare, time-sensitive targeting and geospatial capabilities.

The shared vocabulary that results from the work of the communities of interest takes the form of metadata extensions to the core set of metadata set forth in the Defense Discovery Metadata Standard (DDMS). DDMS is a specification, which, along with various eXtensible Markup Language (XML) schema, is being implemented throughout DoD in order to tag electronic resource holdings.

“Tags represent the content of the resource like a card catalog,” Pratt explained. “Instead of searching through an entire document, you search the metadata instead. This makes for a more efficient search and lends itself to a higher fidelity result.”

Registry the Right Way

"SOA for the real world" by Ash Parikh and Murty Gurajada, JavaWorld.com, 11/29/06

The focus of most SOA implementations today is on the service layer and often extends to the registry to publish and discover services. This approach to SOA is easy to comprehend. As mentioned previously, the concept of exposing services is not a new one. Most software architects and engineers have years of experience building services and should be comfortable applying their knowledge to expose services using the newer Web and XML technologies. Once the services are implemented, registry products based on UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) are used to publish and discover them.

With this architecture in place, enterprises already have much better visibility than was ever possible before WSDL (Web Services Description Language) and UDDI standards emerged on the scene. Unfortunately, it is because of this pleasing ROI that most implementations stop short in their tracks—that is, until it becomes apparent when trying to scale their model that a service layer with a registry is simply not enough for true SOA ROI.

A Roadmap for Interoperability of eHealth Systems

RIDE is a roadmap project for interoperability of eHealth systems leading to recommendations for actions and to preparatory actions at the European level. This roadmap will prepare the ground for future actions as envisioned in the action plan of the eHealth Communication COM 356 by coordinating various efforts on eHealth interoperability in member states and the associated states. Since it is not realistic to expect to have a single universally accepted clinical data model that will be adhered to all over the Europe and that the clinical practice, terminology systems and EHR systems are all a long way from such a complete harmonization; the RIDE project will address the interoperability of eHealth systems with special emphasis on semantic interoperability.

In order to create RIDE Roadmap, first the European best practices in providing semantic interoperability for eHealth domain will be assessed and the quantified requirements to create a valid roadmap will be identified. Based on these requirements, the goals, and the economical, legal, financial and technological challenges of the industry for the 21st century for achieving interoperability in eHealth solutions will be elaborated. RIDE will also focus on the limitations of the policies and strategies currently used in deploying interoperable eHealth solutions.

A research portal for sharing resources addressing semantic interoperability in eHealth domain will be created and maintained; the key actors and stakeholders will be coordinated around RIDE special interest groups to create a wide consensus at the European level. Through eight RIDE workshops a shared vision for building a Europe-wide semantically interoperable eHealth infrastructure will be created. After assessing the gaps between the 'as-is' situation and the 'to-be' eHealth vision, the emerging trends and opportunities to achieve the vision statement, the required advances in the state of the art research, technology and standards will be identified.

More here

webMethods Advances Fabric Vision with Acquisition of Cerebra

PR Here

As organizations move down the paths of SOA and BPM there is a growing realization that there is a price to pay for increased levels of flexibility and reuse. That price is complexity. Simply keeping track of all the assets that are relevant and available for the construction of a new business process is a challenge. Understanding what these assets do and how they interact remains largely unaddressed.

Metadata has long since been identified as a critical building block for any solution, but metadata alone does little to address the issue of complexity and in many cases accentuates it. The key lies with semantic technology and its ability to allow flexible and dynamic integration of metadata. Cerebra is a pioneer and recognized market leader in the use of standards-based, semantic technology for metadata management. Cerebra’s solution automates the integration and organization of IT metadata from any source.

Once embedded in the next release of webMethods Fabric, the Cerebra solution will allow greater visibility into the availability and dependencies of IT assets, consistent and compliant asset reuse across the organization and improved levels of collaboration across all stakeholders through the synchronization of a common business vocabulary.

The acquisition of Cerebra marks a fundamental shift in the levels of visibility and interaction our customers will have with their SOA and BPM assets, delivering greater insight into the opportunities for continuous business process improvement.