Let’s take a look at some of the news featuring OSLC at, and since, the IBM Innovate conference. If you’re not following the @oslcNews Twitter account, you might have missed some of these stories. Even if you are, 140 characters certainly aren’t enough to provide sufficient comment on them. Whatever the case, grab a snack and enjoy the news.
LDP: REST + RDF, finally a practical solution?
I’m cheating a little bit here by reaching back to a blog published by William Vambenepe from Oracle on May 18. I didn’t have time to digest that discussion before heading to Innovate so I’m including it here anyway.
In this blog William discusses his hopes for the W3C Linked Data Platform Working Group. He also covers some of the challenges he anticipates they’ll have to overcome. While acknowledging that LDP has a scope “much larger than Cloud APIs”, he does hope that its output will help provide a practical guide to using linked data for IT and Cloud management. Of course, as with so many things, timing is everything:
The LDP timeline calls for completion in 2014. Who knows what the actual end date will be and what the Cloud API situation will be at that point.
As William also points out, LDP doesn’t have to invent new technology, but “only” find and provide clarity and agreement to users. Perhaps this will make it possible for LDP arrive at a recommendation sooner than 2014 … As Arnaud Le Hors, the co-chair of the LDP WG from IBM, indicated in an interview with the W3C (also in May), there is a real thirst for practical guidance on using linked data. It certainly seems possible that the pressure to “enumerate the necessary standards, and provide guidance on conventions and good practices” for practitioners and (would-be) implementers, combined with the starting point of the Linked Data Basic Profile 1.0, could result in a recommendation before 2014.
If you’d like to provide a more direct influence on the LDP WG, why not go ahead and join!
Transforming your Systems Engineering environment with Linked Lifecycle Data
Writing June 3rd on Jazz.net, Benjamin Williams of IBM kicked off a “series”, consisting of at least a second part, looking into how linked data can improve the lot of those developing complex and embedded systems. This first article looks like a decent on ramp for those new to Linked Data and OSLC.
We’ll keep an eye on the Jazz Team Blog for later posts in this series.
Fastest to “press”
Within two hours of the Monday morning keynotes completing, Michael Vizard of IT Business Edge had a posted a summary and interpretation. Kudos to Michael for providing such a good summary of Kristof’s portion of the keynote in such a short period! If you missed the keynote, or need a refresher, his post is worth reading. The W3C Linked Data Platform Working Group and OSLC are mentioned as technology standards that IBM is, and plans to, leverage to solve the challenges of collaborating across the expanded lifecycle; whether it’s between developers and IT (DevOps), or between clients and the business.
As mentioned in the OSLC at Innovate retrospective, “the mentions in the keynote on Monday helped push the OSLC buzz to a new level.”
Top technologies for collaboration and cloud computing
While many Innovate attendees were racing off to start their day after the Tuesday evening OSLC Hospitality Suite, Darryl K. Taft was publishing an interview with Angel Diaz, IBM VP, Software Standards and Cloud, on eWeek.com. In this interview Angel said, “You need loosely coupled ways of integrating these technologies.” He then identified the top ten technology “standards needed to move to greater collaboration, social business interaction and cloud computing”: Linked Data was #1 and OSLC was #2.
Linked Data, not just one of the base technologies for OSLC, and OSLC, not just a key integration technology, but the top two standards for “greater collaboration, social business interaction and cloud computing”!
Managing with your head in the cloud
Even as I was flying home after Innovate, Martin Banks published an article on BusinessCloud9 about cloud standards, especially for service management, that included an interview with Jamie Thomas, VP, Tivoli Strategy and Development at IBM. Jamie offered up some great quotes, including that IBM Tivoli has embraced OSLC “as a way we can more effectively integrate the product line and also specify how partners and others can interoperate with us” and how OSLC is at the heart of their data integration strategy which “allow us to be more loosely coupled and less brittle when it comes to integration. We are also getting partners now starting to use OSLC to integrate with us and add value both to their offerings, and to us.” Also discussed in the same section is IBM’s support of OpenStack.
Will the future bring more collaboration between the OSLC and OpenStack communities? Hopefully, there’ll be more cross-membership, at least.
Mentoring implementations
The week after Innovate Mentor Graphics announced that it had added integration capabilities its Capital® tool suite, leveraging OSLC. On June 19, John Day also wondered on the Mentor Graphics’ blog, “Why aren’t tools from different suppliers easier to integrate?” John quotes Serge Leef, Mentor Graphics VP: “The flows and methodologies in the automotive design world are based on a patchwork of disintegrated solutions from a variety of smallish, service-oriented vendors, and home grown solutions.” Serge answered thus in response to a question from Paul Hansen, editor and publisher of The Hansen Report on Automotive Electronics, at a presentation at IESF Detroit: “Why the lack of integrated tool solutions?” In that same session, Paul identified OSLC as an important standard to implement the interconnection of tools in support of ISO 26262 and AUTOSAR.
It is great to see continued focus on OSLC in the embedded and complex systems space. The problems embedded in that space are complex enough without having to try to manage traditional tools integrations.
SPRINTing ahead
Michael Vizard of IT Business Edge made another mention of OSLC, this time from a systems engineering perspective similar to Paul Hansen. In the short piece Michael introduces the SPRINT project, mentions the participation of EADS (Innovation Works UK) and IBM (Research, Israel) (here are the other SPRINT partners), and paraphrases some thoughts about the SPRINT initiative from Asaf Adi of IBM Research. I really like this phrase of Michael’s: “it’s high time the tools actually catch up to current engineering and economic realities.” It captures both the sense of need and sense of urgency so many tool users have when it comes to integrations.
More news!
Since I started writing this round-up, I’ve my OSLC news search has already turned up a couple other news items (W3C Linked Data Platform WG on the developerWorks Invisible Thread blog, and a discussion how IBM Rational is widening its focus to DevOps and systems engineering by Tony Baer. Instead of extending this piece to cover those items, I’ll stop here and plan on doing another round-up. (Having written “round-up” in each of the last sentences, I can’t help myself from taking an aside ... that’s my father’s home town, and I made my “city slicker” wife attend that rodeo the year the video was recorded.)
Ahem, back to business. If you come across some OSLC news, or have some of your own, send a tweet to @oslcNews or make a post in the Forums, and I’ll include it in the next round-up. You can carry-on the discussion of all this news in on the forum too.
-
Forum