With the smell of Fall in the air and the kids back at school, at least in Toronto, there’s a sense of new beginnings.
This is certainly the case with OSLC as the Charter for the OASIS OSLC Core TC is up for comment. The comment period is open until 23:59 GMT on 18 September 2013, and if you, or your organization, is an OASIS member, please be sure to review and comment as appropriate. The co-proposers from Ericsson, IBM, Koneksys, KTH, Software AG, and Tasktop, all hope that the review period will be a time in which more OASIS members commit to participate in the TC.
(A little background: The OSLC Core WG will be the first to transition to and OASIS Technical Committee affiliated with the newly created OSLC Member Section at OASIS. As discussed by the the Steering Committee in July, now that the proposal has been submitted for OSLC Core, work is starting to create Charters for the first wave of domain TCs. While nothing is yet set in stone, there seems to be interest in transitioning OSLC Change Management and OSLC Automation in this “first wave”. Please contact me if you have questions, or are interested in contributing to these efforts.)
While the news of the first OSLC Technical Committee at OASIS is a significant milestone for OSLC, the regular work of OSLC Work Groups, including User Groups, is picking up again now that the Summer is over. In particular the Communications and Mobility User Groups are having their first meetings after a Summer break on September 6 and September 4, respectively. (The Embedded Systems User Group met once in August and has another meeting scheduled for September 19.)
Later in September there are a couple of conferences at which OSLC community leaders are presenting about OSLC. First, on September 24, three members of the OSLC community are presenting OSLC to the OMG Embedded Systems Domain Special Interest Group. In that same week, Steve Speicher, OSLC Core WG lead and editor of the W3C LDP specification will be presenting “Leveraging a W3C Linked Data Platform and OSLC for Loosely Coupled Integrations” at JavaOne.
Finally, there have been some interesting discussions for implementers on the Eclipse Lyo mailing list and on the OSLC Forums. There is a growing interest in developing OSLC-based integrations and I think we’ll be seeing more focus on the needs of implementers as a number of our specifications (like OSLC Core) move onto the standardization track at OASIS. If you’re a developer, I encourage you to join in the discussion. It’s great for OSLC, and for the value of the OSLC-based integrations you’ve already built, for their to be more implementations, so please contribute your wisdom. And, as is usually the case with these things, you’ll likely learn something too.