Integration is a social activity

It's been the better part of a year since IBM began working with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C, in our acronym-centric world) to standardize some very basic patterns we think are broadly useful when dealing with read-write linked data.  These are patterns most people would recognize at a glance:

• collections of members
• some rules about how to interact with them (loose analogy: AtomPub aka The Atom Publishing Protocol, but for Linked Data)

We've published two documents since starting, and odds are we'll make substantial updates to at least the draft specification in advance of our March face to face meeting as we resolve issues.  As one of the editors, and a former working group chair myself, it's bittersweet to see how long these things take.  What keeps us going though is knowing how much value standards can have on the industry.  I encourage you to look at the Use Cases (just published) and give the working group feedback; if your organization is a W3C member, you also have the option to join the working group and shape things more directly.  It's a lively bunch.

 

We're not waiting, though. You'll see these patterns, often.  Math geeks, you'll see them used recursively (what a deal!).  You'll find that once you learn one, you already have a leg up learning the next one.  You'll see this in the Jazz for Service Management Provider and Resource Registries (think of them as a yellow pages of product capabilities and as an index of IT resources, respectively).  You'll see them in product betas like Tivoli Monitoring (ITM) for performance monitoring and Tivoli Application Discovery and Dependency Manager (TADDM) for configuration discovery and change history...not an exhaustive list, of course.  You'll see them in open specifications we have (and continue to) draft in the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) community - as with the W3C, we'd like you to come join and participate.  People and organizations participate differently based on their roles and needs -- some focus on the scenarios, others on drafting specifications to address the scenarios and then on implementations of them.  That's OK.  Everyone has something to contribute.

 

What you'll find is that like riffing on a melody, you can take those basic patterns and do some pretty incredible things with them (for any die-hard skeptics, I refer you to Mozart's variations on "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star").  Over time as we get further along you'll see other posts here on some of the basics we built on, like REST and Linked Data, in addition to OSLC and Jazz for Service Management. 

For now, I'll leave you with some bedtime viewing/reading - with separate areas for technical and non-technical audiences.  And yes, there may be a quiz next time.