Corporate Governance is the set of processes, customs, policies, laws, and institutions affecting the way a corporation is directed, administered or controlled. Corporate governance also includes the relationships among the many stakeholders involved and the goals for which the corporation is governed. The principal stakeholders are the shareholders, management, and the board of directors. Other stakeholders include labor(employees), customers, creditors (e.g., banks, bond holders), suppliers, regulators, and the community at large.

IT Management

IT Management is concerned with exploring and understanding Information Technology as a corporate resource that determines both the strategic and operational capabilities of the firm in designing and developing products and services for maximum customer satisfaction, corporate productivity, profitability and competitiveness.

List of IT Management disciplines

1. Business/IT alignment
2. IT Governance
3. IT Financial Management
4. IT Service Management
5. Sourcing

IT Governance

IT Governance is a subset discipline of Corporate Governance focused on information technology systems and their performance and risk management. The rising interest in IT governance is partly due to compliance initiatives, for instance Sarbanes-Oxley in the USA and Basel II in Europe, as well as the acknowledgment that IT projects can easily get out of control and profoundly affect the performance of an organization.

SOA Governance

SOA Governance is a concept used for activities related to exercising control over services in an SOA. SOA governance can be seen as a subset of IT governance which itself is a subset of Corporate governance. The focus is on those resources to be leveraged for SOA to deliver value to the business. SOA requires a number of IT support processes as well as organizational processes that will also involve the business leaders. SOA needs a solid foundation that is based on standards and includes policies, contracts and service level agreements. The business is expected to be able to use services to build and change the organisations business process quickly. To do so, a degree of granularity in the services available will be required. Consequently an SOA increases the need for good governance as it will help assign decision-making authorities, roles and responsibilities and bring focus to the organisational capabilities needed to be successful.

I have worked with SOA Governance Lifecycle as described by IBM which I written about in an earlier blog about IBM Smart SOA Approach Lifecycles – Service, Governance, and Policy. The tools includes all the tools mentioned in other paragraphs in this blog. Additional tools including WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR), WebSphere DataPower (WDP), WebSphere Business Service Fabric (WBSF), Tivoli Security Policy Manager (TSPM), Rational Asset Manager (RAM), Rational Portfolio Manager (RPM), Rational RequisitePro (RRP), WebSphere Integration Developer (WID), Tivoli Composite Application Manager (ITCAM), Tivoli Service Level Advisor (TSLA), and WebSphere Business Monitor (WBM).

Some key activities that are often mentioned as being part of SOA governance are:

1. Managing the portfolio of services: planning development of new services and updating current services
2. Managing the service lifecycle: meant to ensure that updates of services do not disturb current service consumers
3. Using policies to restrict behavior: rules can be created that all services need to apply to, to ensure consistency of services
4. Monitoring performance of services: because of service composition, the consequences of service downtime or underperformance can be severe. By monitoring service performance and availability, action can be taken instantly when a problem occurs.

IT Service Management

IT Service Management is frequently cited as a primary enabler of IT Governance objectives. IT Service Management in the broader sense overlaps with the discipline of IT portfolio management, especially in the area of IT planning and financial control. The degree to which software engineering is an ITSM concern is unclear. Certainly, the available ITSM literature has a distinct operational flavor, but also shades into software quality and architectural concerns (especially related to infrastructure, capacity, and operability), while usually steering clear of project management and actual software development. Similarly, the relationship of ITSM to the field of Enterprise Architecture is unclear.

Recently, I was introduced to ITIL by ITSMF as service management process framework.

ITIL

In the ITIL framework, change management is responsible for controlling change to all configuration items in the configuration management database, within the live environment, test and training environments. It is not typically responsible for change within development projects.

There are five Key Principles.

1. Service Strategy
2. Service Design
3. Service Transition
4. Service Operation
5. Continual Service Improvement

IT Change Management

The goal of the Change Management process is to ensure that standardized methods and procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all changes, in order to minimize the impact of change-related incidents upon service quality, and consequently improve the day-to-day operations of the organization.

I have worked on different tools to support change management including Endevor, ChangeMan, PVCS, Continuus, ClearCase, CVS, and Subversion over the years.

IT Project Management

Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives.

I have worked with Rational Unified Process (RUP) and Capability Maturity Model (CMM) project management process framework which are supported by tools including Rational Method Composer and WebSphere Business Modeler.

RUP

In the RUP framework, different methodologies are supported -  waterfall, iterative, and agile.

There are four phases of the project lifecycle.

1. inception
2. elaboration
3. construction
4. transition

There are six engineering disciplines.

1. Business modeling discipline
2. Requirements discipline
3. Analysis and design discipline
4. Implementation discipline
5. Test discipline
6. Deployment discipline

There are three supporting disciplines.

1. Configuration and Change management discipline
2. Project management discipline
3. Work Product

CMM

In CMM framework, each model contains process areas, each process area contains goals, and each goal contains practices.

Model

1. Development
2. Acquisition
3. Services

Process Area Category for Development

1. Project Management
2. Process Management
3. Engineering
4. Support

Practice for Engineering

1. REQM – Requirements Management
2. RD – Requirements Development
3. TS – Technical Solution
4. PI – Product Integration
5. VER – Verification
6. VAL – Validation

Maturity Level 2

1. CM – Configuration Management
2. MA – Measurement and Analysis
3. PMC – Project Monitoring and Control
4. PP – Project Planning
5. PPQA – Process and Product Quality Assurance
6. REQM – Requirements Management
7. SAM – Supplier Agreement Management

This one I have not worked on directly or indirectly as far I know. But Fortune 500 firms I have consulted with are ISO certified.

ISO 38500

ISO 38500 describes a framework with six guiding principles for corporate governance of information technology and a model for directors to govern IT with three main tasks: evaluate, direct and control. ISO 38500 differentiates between “Governance”, “Management” and “Control”.

Source: Wikipedia

Rational is Agile Episode 2
Architecture? Agile Don’t Need No Architecture
Episode 2 discusses the great misconception and key role software architecture, modeling and construction plays in governing Agile projects across the software lifecycle.

Rational is Agile Episode 3
So Passe… Agile Doesn’t Need Testers
Episode 3 explains test driven development, the importance of test automation, the different roles test and QA professionals play and organizational adjustments to consider when moving to an Agile approach.

Rational is Agile Episode 4
Agile Does Not Scale? It definitely does!
Episode 4 busts the myth that Agile does not scale and answers the question how Agile can work for enterprise size organizations giving consideration to not only risks associated with size but also team geographic and temporal distribution, regulatory compliance, and governance.

Rational is Agile Episode 5
Agile and Governance. Oxymoron?

video #6 coming soon…

Rational is Agile Episode 6
Agile for Legacy Projects. Are you Serious?

video #6 coming soon…

Rational is Agile Episode 7
Making it Real – Getting Agile and Rational Ready.

video #7 coming soon…

This document was an attempt to persuade CERN management that a global hypertext system was in CERN’s interests. Note that the only name I had for it at this time was “Mesh” — I decided on “World Wide Web” when writing the code in 1990.

In this video, Tim mentioned:
- Linked Data (I want you to make it! I want you to demand it!)
- World where everybody has put data on the web
- LD three rules – http for all data, ui standard format, data is relationships
- http://dbpedia.org
- Raw Data Now!
- Interoperability between social networking sites
- http://openstreetmap.org

As an Electronics and Communications Engineering (ECE) student, I was very excited about Integrated Circuits, Computers, Robotics, Fiber Optics, Microwaves, Satellites. I had fantasized about being a scientist in one of these fields. The first three are more related to programming. The rest are more related to communications. As the core of human communications, one of my college papers was about Speech Technology.

- Speech synthesis is the artificial reproduction of human speech
- Speech recognition is converting human speech into machine-readable input

Back in 2000 and ever since, I had the pleasure of working (and later leading) on with Nuance, Periphonics, AccuVoice, and Genesys products project design and implementation at very large corporations for their Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) systems.

- Periphonics, which is not VoiceXML enabled at that time, for IVR and to write the application
- AccuVoice for text-to-speech capabilities
- Nuance for voice recognition, speech-to-text, and text-to-speech
- Genesys for CTI

I was involved from project vision to transition.

- project definition and requirements
- CTI/IVR logistics planning and provisioning
- call flow, application design and development
- voice vocabulary and dictionary creation and deployment
- legacy and middleware enterprise architecture and integration
- call center routing and call center capabilties
- no, I was not a voice talent

I even have a chance to install some of the voice hardware into the rack. Yes, the hardware technician was very patient with me noosing around. Seriously, he wanted to share his knowledge.

No, I did not personally work on Screen Pop technology which is related to the future technology like Portal.

Screen Pop provide customer service representative (CSR) all information about the caller without keying any input through use of numbers associated with the caller like Automatic number identification (ANI) and Dialed Number Identification Service (DNIS). This is the reason why when I am asked by IVR system or CSR my phone number, I still ask why? I expect the IVR or CSR to have all the information about me already. I think they always just ask part of their compliance or policy or as a confirmation and not because they do not have the information.

In 2000, I came across speech technologies combined with web technologies.

- VoiceXML
- Some of them promise develop once and access in two ways – phone and web
- Some of them promise web navigation using voice (similar to dictation software technology)

Currently, related to speech technology:
- VoiceXML is still the major standard
- IBM WebSphere Voice supports VoiceXML
- Nuance VM2T is voicemail-to-text service (software as a service)
- Google Voice has launch voicemail-to-text feature
- Mac OS has Alex for speech synthesis
- Windows Vista speech recognition take document dictation, control application
- Voice Access Security
- I think, there is language translation gadget using speech recognition

These are sample of speech recognition applications as listed in wikipedia:
- voice dialing (e.g., “Call home”)
- call routing (e.g., “I would like to make a collect call”)
- domotic appliance control
- content-based spoken audio search (e.g., find a podcast where particular words were spoken)
- simple data entry (e.g., entering a credit card number)
- preparation of structured documents (e.g., a radiology report)
- speech-to-text processing (e.g., word processors or emails)
- and in aircraft cockpits (usually termed Direct Voice Input)

(I wonder what input technology the future has to offer. I think it will be in a form of a wave energy. We had sound, speech, microwave, radio, infrared, light, electro, sub-atomic rays. Brainwave is next.

I once asked IBM Research on Ask IBM session in a conference, questions similar these:
- Do IBM know of existing technology that can access our brain wireslessly?
- Do IBM know of exisitng technology that can network with our brain wirelessly?
- Is IBM working on such technology?

I still yet to hear from IBM.

I am sure someone already done it if not working on it. The brain is just another computer to hack or network with, depending on the context of the access.)

==============
David S. Linthicum: Dave Linthicum here.
David S. Linthicum: Any questions around “Building the Private Cloud?”
Geoffrey Collins: Dave, might have missed this point in your talk – but are there any noteable success stories out there yet (in the private cloud space)?
David S. Linthicum: Yes. I have a few clients.
David S. Linthicum: The biggest one is the DOD with thier “Network Centric” program.
Byron Pojol: hi dave, here’s what i categorized clouds. internal (enterprise) and external (aws). private (ning or small bank using cloud) and public (linkedin and adp)
Byron Pojol: dave, what do you think?
David S. Linthicum: Sure, that works. However, the thinking here is still evolving.
David S. Linthicum: Some don’t like the term “private cloud” at all.
David S. Linthicum: Some just consider it another word for “SOA.”
David S. Linthicum: Private clouds are a bit different in that they are shareable.
David S. Linthicum: In essense, having a small AWS, that you control, inside of your enterprise.
David S. Linthicum: Typically they leverage virtualization, but sometimes not.
Geoffrey Collins: Thanks Dave. And if the DoD has a “crisis of software economics”, then most other larger IT shops can’t be too far behind…
David S. Linthicum: You are correct.
David S. Linthicum: The spending and complexity has gotton out of control.
Byron Pojol: dave, yes i have worked on projects using shared services resources (architect, engineer, admin, server, network securty, etc.) with multiple Business Units.
Byron Pojol: BU has apps similar or need to use same server.
David S. Linthicum: It’s more difficult to manage, but less $.
David S. Linthicum: Okay, I’m about done here. Any other questions?
Byron Pojol: The paradigm before is to isolate as possible esp if app is critical. but nowadays virtualization and service manangement has caught up with our instinct. that we are possitive of outcome for sharing apps and servers for diff BU and customers.
Byron Pojol: thanks.
David S. Linthicum: Good point Byron.
Geoffrey Collins: Good info Byron!
David S. Linthicum: I can be reached at:david@bluemountainlabs.com, if you have additional questions or comments.
Geoffrey Collins: Great (LZA) minds…;-)
David S. Linthicum: Thanks all!
==============

These are the points I made with clearer samples.

Cloud Categories:
- Internal Cloud (enterprise shared services)
- External Cloud (amazon web services ec2)

External Cloud Sub-Categories:
- Private Cloud (ning private network or small bank using external cloud banking software services)
- Public Cloud (linkedin public network or adp for employers)

In 2003 and 2004, I have a chance to work with SOAP for CICS (which is still a CICS feature pack at this time) and with multiple projects of integrating CICS with web application and message-oriented middleware in distributed and mainframe systems. This is the renaissance of CICS being modernized with emerging technologies like SOAP, AXIS, etc. Also WebSphere HATS (Host Access Transformation Server) are enabling mainframe systems for web applications. This also the time when WebSphere is the transaction server of choice in distributed platform if not in mainframe platform.

Currently, I still consider CICS as my choice of OLTP and platform for large enterprise. WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Message Broker, WebSphere MQ, WebSphere Process Server and other WebSphere products run on mainframe. Part of these software products, if not all, run as CICS applications in mainframe.

Trivia #1: Do you know that Hurlsley is the birthplace of WMQ and CICS?

Trivia #2: Do you know that VSE is the first Virtual Systems environment? (Not z series, p series or VMware)

Trivia #3: Do you know that CICS is the first application that sleep when not doing a tasks to improve processor performance?

History

IBM “Blue Letter” 269-44, dated July 8, 1969 announced the availability of the System/360 Customer Information Control System, Program Product 5736-U11, was “ready for shipment”.

CICS is born

In 1968, CICS became available as a free, Type II Application Program, with users in every industry category. Transamerica in Los Angeles, Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO), Colorado Public Service of Colorado, United Airlines, and many others were early adopters of the software known as CICS. The other accounts which had begun to develop their own approach (Commonwealth Edison, ConEd, etc) continued with their proprietary software.

In 1969, IBM announced Program Products and CICS was no longer a free software offering. This did inhibit sales and customer acceptance. CICS enabled customers, in any industry, to quickly implement their online systems, most of which were inquiry only at that time.

The VSE factor

In 1971, the huge demand from smaller customers was heard and CICS for the Disk Operating System (precursor to VSE) was announced and delivered. There was the standard version of CICS/DOS but also a very small, entry level version called CICS/DOS Entry.

In 1972, the IBM 3270 was announced and delivered, and customers were ready to evolve from the hard copy terminals, such as the AT&T Teletype and the IBM 1050 or 2740/41 to video display terminals. CICS was an early supporter of the new technology.

CICS goes virtual

Also in 1972, IBM announced the notion of ‘virtual systems’ and a new operating systems would be introduced to support the new technology. Unlike the Primary Control Program (PCP), Multiprogramming with a Fixed number of Tasks (MFT) or Multiprogramming with a Variable number of Tasks (MVT) of the past, CICS was being asked to support the new VS environment.

In 1972-73, CICS moved quickly to support the new virtual system, for both the large MVS-class customer, but also for the smaller DOS/VS customer. By this time customers had made serious commitments to online systems, and a number of new technologies were added to CICS, including support for online update and recovery/restart. Support of new data management technology, such as DL/I was incorporated into both the MVS and DOS versions of CICS.

In the 1975-76 timeframe, IBM introduced VTAM and System Network Architecture, taking users from the previous, primitive support of BTAM into newer, more capable support of networking. CICS delivered its first support of VTAM/SNA in 1975/76.

Command Level

In 1977, CICS introduced its command level programming interface, a dramatic change in application programming which has had its positive effect to this day. Command level program isolates the application from its physical environment and has enabled customers to implement distributed systems (client/server).

Multiple Region Operation

In the 1978-1980 timeframe, CICS delivered its support for Multiple Region Operation (MRO) and Intersystem Communication (ISC), enabling the customer to easily distribute applications and data resources across multiple locations. This allowed customers to overcome the early storage limitations of virtual systems, and enabled the customer to have multiple, concurrent units of CICS-related work running on multiple machine processors (multi-processors).

High availability

The 1980s brought continued enhancements to CICS and more capability for the CICS customer. High availability was enhanced with the new XRF support, CICS was ported to new environments, such as the personal computer (CICS OS/2). More portability of CICS was offered with CICS running on UNIX machines, the AS/400 and non-IBM environments such as DEC or HP.

the 1990’s we go parallel!

CICS had evolved its distributed architecture beginning in the 1978-1980 timeframe. This has served it well and the needs of its users as well, with the advent of parallel systems in the 1990s. CICS, with its MRO architecture, fits extremely well, with the concepts and goals of parallel systems. Parallel systems users are motivated to have higher system thruput and/or higher system and application availability. CICS support of parallel systems supports these goals. Work can be distributed across any number of MVS regions or systems within a sysplex, and applications can be cloned and data can be shared, such that if any single component becomes unavailable, its work can be carried out by the other system.

The Internet

In addition to CICS’ support of parallel systems, the product was quick to provide support of the Internet. Beginning with the CICS Internet Gateway and the [[CICS Gateway for Java]], CICS has since evolved its support to now offer multiple ways for the user to web enable his applications. A web browser can access CICS directly or through an outboard server such as AIX or Windows NT, or via the operating system’s web server. The CICS Transaction Gateway can be used either on an outboard server or in its own address space on MVS.

Java

Business applications, written in Java to work with CICS applications and data resources, can execute as applets on a desktop web browser, on an outboard server as a servlet, in a CICS Transaction Gateway region as a servlet, or even within the CICS address space. IBM’s WebSphere Application Servers can be used as front-ends to CICS. CICS is very much on the forefront of e-commerce and e-business.

Open Transaction Environment

In version 3.2 (2007) IBM enhanced the CICS-MQ interface to support the OTE environment. Also the IBM TCP/IP interface EZACIC01 support the OTE environment starting with z/OS R7 as well.

SOA

In addition to CICS’s comprehensive support for Java and the Internet, the most recent releases of CICS now offer support for new environments through the use of [[Service Oriented Architecture]] (SOA). The goal of SOA is to enable applications, residing anywhere, can access other applications, with security understood and have the results of the called application returned to the requester. Reusability of existing applications is a major benefit of SOA, meaning applications and their services can be implemented on any system, not just the system of the requesting application.

CICS has increased its interoperability with IBM’s Websphere Application Server (WAS) and Enterprise Java Beans (Java applications). A CICS EJB can invoke an EJB executing in a WAS environment and vice versa. CICS’s Transaction Gateway is now the strategic interface for CICS applications to invoke WebSphere applications located in other operating systems environments (images).

XPLINK

Starting with version 3.1 (2006) IBM introduce an new X8/X9 TCB like the L8/L9 TCB for DB2 in order to support a C/C++ XPLINK enviroment.
Of course where are other new TCBs with CTS 3.1

the 2007 we go 64-bit!

Starting with CTS 3.2 (2007) we got 64bit support for CHANNELS/CONTAINER. A new feature is also Dynamic DFHRPL.

Source of history: History – CICS Wiki

Source: DERI Semantic Web Web 20 SOA
(The pdf can be found at the MQIT PRESS BOX at the bottom right of MQIT.com.)

Before viewing the four videos below that introduce Semantic Web, what is semantic web?

The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. It is a collaborative effort led by W3C with participation from a large number of researchers and industrial partners.

The Semantic Web is a Web of data. There is a lot of data we all use every day, and it’s not part of the Web. For example, I can see my bank statements on the web, and my photographs, and I can see my appointments in a calendar. But can I see my photos in a calendar to see what I was doing when I took them? Can I see bank statement lines in a calendar? Why not? Because we don’t have a web of data. Because data is controlled by applications, and each application keeps it to itself.

The vision of the Semantic Web is to extend principles of the Web from documents to data. Data should be accessed using the general Web architecture using, e.g., URI-s; data should be related to one another just as documents (or portions of documents) are already. This also means creation of a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries, to be processed automatically by tools as well as manually, including revealing possible new relationships among pieces of data.

Semantic Web technologies can be used in a variety of application areas; for example: in data integration, whereby data in various locations and various formats can be integrated in one, seamless application; in resource discovery and classification to provide better, domain specific search engine capabilities; in cataloging for describing the content and content relationships available at a particular Web site, page, or digital library; by intelligent software agents to facilitate knowledge sharing and exchange; in content rating; in describing collections of pages that represent a single logical “document”; for describing intellectual property rights of Web pages (see, eg, the Creative Commons), and in many others.

The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content. It derives from World Wide Web Consortium director Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange.

At its core, the semantic web comprises a set of design principles, collaborative working groups, and a variety of enabling technologies. Some elements of the semantic web are expressed as prospective future possibilities that are yet to be implemented or realized. Other elements of the semantic web are expressed in formal specifications. Some of these include Resource Description Framework (RDF), a variety of data interchange formats (e.g. RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, N-Triples), and notations such as RDF Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL), all of which are intended to provide a formal description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain.

Video #1: Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google, on Web 2.0 and Web 3.0

Transcript by MQIT Corporation

Easy question.
What is Web 3.0?
We know what is Web 2.0 is.
What has Google see Web 3.0 ought to be?

Well, Web 2.0 is a marketing term.
And I think you just invented Web 3.0.
But if I were to guess what Web 2.0 is.
I would tell you that it is a different way of building an applications.
Up until now Web 2.0 has been a term that corresponds to something called AJAX.
AJAX is a computer architecture that is the underlaying architecture that I have been talking about.
And my prediction is would be that Web 3.0 will be ultimately be seen.
As applications that are piece together.
A number of characteristics.
Application are relatively small.
The data is in the cloud.
The applications can run on any device, PC or mobile phone.
That the applications are very fast.
And that they are very customizable.
And further more the applications are distributed by virus.
Essentially virally, literally by social networks, by email.
You will not go to the store to purchase them.
You will say – I send to you.
Here is a new interesting way of doing one thing or another.
That is a very different application model than we have ever seen in computing.
Very different from the mainframe era.
Very different from the PC industry.
Much likely to be very very large.
Has low variance entry.
The new generation of tools that is being announce today.
Google and other companies make it relatively easy to do.
Solves a lot of problem.
And works everywhere.

Video #2: Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of WWW and Director of W3C, on the Semantic Web

Video #3: Introduction to Semantic Web from Digital Bazaar

Video #4: Semantic Web from GoogleTalks and DERI

The Semantic Web is a field aiming a the creation, deployment, and interoperation of machine readable data on the Internet. In the talk we present some projects in DERI on Semantic Web technologies – notably Semantic Interlinking of Online Community sites, Social Semantic Collaborative Filtering, and ActiveRDF, a library for Browsing, programming and navigating Semantic Web data.

The SIOC (Semantic Interlinking of Online Communities) project is an effort aiming at establishing and deploying a metadata vocabulary for interlinking and connecting distributed conversation on blogs, bulletin boards, and mailing lists. The vocabulary has been implemented…

Some of the technologies and projects mentioned in the videos above.

RDFa, Resource Description Framework in attribute
Today’s web is built predominantly for human consumption. Even as machine-readable data begins to appear on the web, it is typically distributed in a separate file, with a separate format, and very limited correspondence between the human and machine versions. As a result, web browsers can provide only minimal assistance to humans in parsing and processing web data: browsers only see presentation information. We introduce RDFa, which provides a set of XHTML attributes to augment visual data with machine-readable hints. We show how to express simple and more complex datasets using RDFa, and in particular how to turn the existing human-visible text and links into machine-readable data without repeating content.

Microformats
Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging).

Operator
Operator leverages microformats and other semantic data that are already available on many web pages to provide new ways to interact with web services.

SIOC, Semantic-Interlinked Online Communities
What is SIOC? The SIOC initiative (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) aims to enable the integration of online community information. SIOC provides a Semantic Web ontology for representing rich data from the Social Web in RDF. It has recently achieved significant adoption through its usage in a variety of commercial and open-source software applications, and is commonly used in conjunction with the FOAF vocabulary for expressing personal profile and social networking information. By becoming a standard way for expressing user-generated content from such sites, SIOC enables new kinds of usage scenarios for online community site data, and allows innovative semantic applications to be built on top of the existing Social Web. The SIOC ontology was recently published as a W3C Member Submission, which was submitted by 16 organisations.

OWL, Web Ontology Language
The World Wide Web as it is currently constituted resembles a poorly mapped geography. Our insight into the documents and capabilities available are based on keyword searches, abetted by clever use of document connectivity and usage patterns. The sheer mass of this data is unmanageable without powerful tool support. In order to map this terrain more precisely, computational agents require machine-readable descriptions of the content and capabilities of Web accessible resources. These descriptions must be in addition to the human-readable versions of that information. The OWL Web Ontology Language is intended to provide a language that can be used to describe the classes and relations between them that are inherent in Web documents and applications.

ActiveRDF
ActiveRDF is a library for accessing RDF data from Ruby programs. It can be used as data layer in Ruby-on-Rails, in the same way as you can use ActiveRecord for accessing relational databases. Using ActiveRDF with Ruby-on-Rails allows you to create semantic web applications very rapidly. ActiveRDF gives you a domain specific language for your RDF model: you can address RDF resources, classes, properties, etc. programmatically, without queries.

SSCF / SIOC Support
This project delivers a number of components that combined together allow users to search and browse the information space using existing semantic relations and social annotations.

The three first components (partially refactored from FOAFRealm and JeromeDL projects) are:
* SSCF – Social Semantic Collaborative Filtering
* MBB – MultiBeeBrowse – a modern faceted navigation
* SQE – Semantic Query Expansion based on a community-aware user profile

JeromeDL
JeromeDL is a Social Semantic Digital Library. As a digital library, it allows institutions to easily publish documents on the Web. It supports a variety of document formats and allows to store and query a rich bibliographic description of each document.

FoaF, Friend of a Friend
Our goal is to design and implement D-FOAF, a distributed authentication and trust infrastructure without a centralised authority. D-FOAF will be a backbone for trust applications based on social relationships and will establish idenity of users similar to the way we establish identity and trust in real life. D-FOAF will be based on previous work like the P2P HyperCuP topology and FOAFRealm, a Semantic Web based user and relationship management system. Implementation work will be conducted for the J2EE, .NET and PHP environments.

SKOS, Simple Knowledge Organization System

Information architect will explain that data modeling is not information architecture or data architecture is not information architecture. To simplify what information means in information architect perspective, it is data plus metadata and more. Some IT architects including myself always think of data as data plus metadata already and more.

Metadata is data about data. What are examples of metadata I used extensively unless otherwise noted?

In early years:
- COBOL copybook
- DB schema
- JCL – Job Control Language (from IBM)
- Name-Value Pair
- EDI – Electronic Data Interchange

In Web 1.0:
- XML – Extensible Markup Language (from W3C)
- XSD – XML Schema (from W3C)
- XMI – XML Metadata Interchange (from OMG)
- WSDL – Web Services Description Language (from W3C)
- SDO – Service Data Objects (from OSOA)
- WS-BPEL – Web Services Business Process Execution Language (from OASIS)

Currently in Web 2.0, Web 3.0, and Semantic Web:
- RDF – Resource Description Framework (from W3C) [I did not used extensively]
- OWL – Web Ontology Language (from W3C) [I did not used extensively]
- Tag – “like tagging a blog”

What are examples of information architecture major concepts I designed and worked on for clients?
- DW – Data Warehouse
- DM – Data Mining / Data Mart
- BI – Business Intelligence
- FDBS – Federated Database System
- MDM – Master Data Management
- DI – Data Integration
- ETL – Extract Transform Load
- Iaas – Information as a Service
- Vitualized Data

SOA initiatives always include some of information architecture major concepts as listed above if not all. And SOA is best for BPM ESB and EAI solutions. Either on cloud or enterprise.

Hope this will give a good perspective about information architecture and help you succeed.

IBM offers these information management solutions:

IBM delivers market-leading solutions to critical information intensive business problems allowing customers to achieve new levels of innovation through best of breed information integration and MDM capabilities.

Why IBM Data Warehouse?
IBM provides a unified, powerful data warehouse delivering access to structured and unstructured information and operational and transactional data in real time.

Why IBM MDM?
IBM Multiform Master Data Management manages master data domains (customers, accounts, products) that have a significant impact on the most important business processes and realizes the promise of SOA.

Why IBM Information Integration?
IBM Information Integration is the leader in data integration. Our platform integrates and transforms data improving productivity, flexibility and performance, so you have the right information for your business.

Why IBM Industry Models and Accelerators?
IBM delivers market-leading solutions to critical information intensive business problems allowing customers to achieve new levels of innovation through best of breed Industry Models and Accelerators.