Title: Suggested Roadmap from the FEA to SOASIA
1Suggested Roadmap from the FEA to SOA/SIA
- Management of Change Conference, Hyatt at Penns
Landing, Philadelphia, PA - Workshop - Realizing the Promise of
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) - Panelist Brand Niemann, Chair, Semantic
Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP) - Best Practices Committee (BPC), CIO Council, and
- Enterprise Architecture Team, Office of
Environmental Information - U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
- May 25, 2005
2Overview
- Moderator
- Dawn Meyerriecks, Vice President for Shared
Technical Services, AOL - Panelists
- Kevin Lawson, Founding Member, Solutions
Engineering Center of Excellence, U.S. Department
of Homeland Security. - Dennis Nadler, Chief Technology Officer, Merlin
Technical Solutions. - Brand Niemann, Computer Scientist, U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency. - Ron Schaefer, Principal Software Systems
Engineer. MITRE. - Robert Walker, Director for Federal Alliances,
BEA Systems, Inc.
3Overview
- Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA) represents
the next paradigm shift in government information
technology. The ability to leverage legacy
systems and reuse them in future architecture
will result in significant cost savings. SOAs
mandate is to refashion applications as services
and requires a transformation of technical
approach, IT workflow and business planning. This
panel will cover leveraging legacy systems, the
functionality of which can be integrated into new
applications with minimal investment. Topics of
debate will include the technical challenges as
well as the topic of SOA serving as a change
agent.
4Comments
- Workshop Title and Description and Recent SOA
Events Raise the Expectations - Realizing the Promise, Next paradigm shift in
government IT, and A change agent. - For example recently four events in two days (May
11-12, 2005) Federal Architect Forum, Chief
Architect Forum, BEA Actional SOA Events. - First Key Off the Excellent Workshop Yesterday
- Convergence of Emerging Technologies.
- Then Suggest a Roadmap from the Federal
Enterprise Architecture (FEA) to SOA/SIA for
Information Sharing and Collaboration (the
title of another Workshop) - Semantic Interoperability Architecture
- I went from being the Chair of the CIO Councils
Web Services Working Group to now the Chair of
the CIO Councils Semantic Interoperability
Community of Practice (SICoP) which should
explain something about the evolution of my
interests.
5Comments
- The Convergence of Emerging Technologies
Workshop - Panelists told us about the benefits of dark
fiber, Web services, and grid computing. - Moderator asked how to get started in government
with these technologies and why if this
beneficial convergence, then why not more
deployment in government? - My answer Besides the obvious organizational and
cultural barriers, there is a need for a business
case and an architecture. The technologies tells
us how we can do something, but not what to
do with them. So I would like to suggest a
Roadmap from the FEA to SOA/SIA (I call it a 3 by
3 Line of Sight) and provided two examples. - Note 1 Gartner characterizes the Federal
Enterprise Architecture as A set of Reference
Models backed by law and administrative rule and
not a roadmap, but a guide to getting there. - Note 2 The Industry EA SIG recently said The
FEA Reference Models do not constitute a
comprehensive EA methodology or approach by
themselves. These FEA Reference Models, as
populated, specifically serve mainly as
mechanisms for identifying and coding initiatives
via a common taxonomy and as checklists for
coverage in an EA.
6Suggested Roadmap
- Dimensions of Interoperability
- Organizational Interoperability is about
streamlining administrative processes and
information architecture top the institutional
goals we want to achieve and to facilitate the
interplay of technical and organizational
concerns. It requires the identification of
business interfaces, and coordination
throughout MS and EU. - Technical Interoperability is about knitting
together IT-systems and software, defining and
using open inter-faces, standards, and protocols.
It relies on cooperation as well as on technical
infrastructures. - Semantic Interoperability is about ensuring that
the meaning of the information we exchange is
contained and understood by the involved people,
applications, and institutions. It needs the
know-how of sector institutions and publication
of specifications.
Source Barbara Held, The European
Interoperability Framework for pan-European
eGovernment Services, IDABC, Enterprise
Industry Directorate-General, European
Commission, February 17-18, 2005
7Suggested Roadmap
- Evolution of the SOA Platform
- Simple Web Services exposing data and actions
- Composite Applications business processes
consumed by portals - Service Infrastructure
Sources (1) David Chappell, Business Process
Management in a Service-Oriented World, Federal
Architect Forum, May 11, 2005, (2) Bruce Graham,
Taking SOA from Pilot to Production with Service
Infrastructure, May 12, 2005 and (3) David
Martin, Semantic Web Services Promise, Progress,
and Challenges, SWANS Conference Tutorial, April
8, 2005.
8Suggested Roadmap
Dimensions of Interoperability
Line of Sight
3
Semantic
2
Technical
1
Organizational
Simple
Composite
Infrastructure
Evolution of the SOA Platform
9Suggested Roadmap
- Example 1 - Web Services for E-Government
- 1. Organizational-Simple
- Led CIO Council award winning VoiceXML Web
Service for EPA Emergency Response pilot that has
subsequently been commercialized and implemented
as Infrastructure (see below). - 2. Technical-Composite
- Lead the CIO Councils E-Forms for E-Gov Pilot
that saw 13 E-forms vendors each build an XML Web
Service using a common XML Schema for E-Grants to
increase their collective technical
interoperability with one another. - 3. Semantic-Infrastructure
- Our recent Semantic Web for Military Applications
Conference featured 40 vendors implementing
RDF/OWL including the Putting Context to Work
Semantic Keys to Improve Rapid First Response
that used an event ontology to achieve semantic
interoperability across five vendors.
10Suggested Roadmap
- Example 2 - Development of the FEA Data and
Information Reference Model - 1. Organizational-Simple
- A Wiki is being used to support a Community of
Practice in the publish, find, and bind of SOA
in their development of the basic documents and
items 2 and 3 below. - 2. Technical-Composite
- A Wiki is also being used as a registry of the
taxonomy of XML Schemas to organize the
governments data and information for sharing
within the context of the taxonomy. - 3. Semantic-Infrastructure
- A Wiki is also being used for coordination of
taxonomy and ontology development, sharing, and
reuse across the government and non-government
organizations.
11Suggested Roadmap
- Sir Tim Berners-Lee at the SWANS Conference,
April 7, 2005, on the Government Role - Making public data available in standard Semantic
Web formats. - Requiring funded data to be available in Semantic
Web formats - Encouraging flagship applications.
- Supporting Web Science research for advanced
tools.
- Substance of the Semantic Web, Deborah
McGuinness, Stanford and Mike Dean, BBN, at the
SWANS Conference, April 7, 2005, on the Selected
Technical Benefits - 1. Integrating Multiple Data Sources
- 2. Semantic Drill Down / Focused Perusal
- 3. Statements about Statements
- 4. Inference
- 5. Translation
- 6. Smart (Focused) Search
- 7. Smarter Search Configuration
- 8. Proof and Trust
12Suggested Roadmap
- Caution Be Prepared to Slow Down Road Work
Ahead - David Chappell, Federal Architect Forum, April 8,
2004 The "Big Bet" - Has anyone ever tried to
create a complete, multi-vendor security
framework before? Will this work? Keep an eye on
the progress of WS-Security implementations - The
success of SOA may depend on this technology. - David Martin, SRI International, April 8, 2005
Sociological (crossing the chasm) getting to
where the payoff exceeds the overhead (for
significant numbers). - Russ Reopell, MITRE, Intelligence Community
Metadata Working Group Meeting, May 4-5, 2005
The SOA Threat - Greg Lomow, BearingPoint Work on a Multi-vendor
Security SOA Framework for DHS (Source JP
Morgenthal, May 26, 2005). - SOA Leaders, Building the Business Case for SOA,
June 9, 2005. - SecurE-Biz CXO Summit Conference, SOA/ Web
Services Track, June 29-30, 2005.