EU research goes RSS

Great to see that more and more EU projects are getting RSS feeds - hook into KnowledgeBoard (KB2.0 RSS) and now Agentlink (Agentlink RSS).

Software patents

Everybody's favourite topic - but sometimes this is simply just ridiculous (also see this).

Theory meets reality?

Fast Company on Game Theory. Be interesting to see if people manage to come up with real refutations...

A nice quote

"The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive." - John Sladek - thanks to quotes of the day!

More interesting posts on the Complexity / Pragmatics of Web Services Protocols

At hinchcliffe.org and this excellent post by Adam Bosworth (Nov, 2004). It's hard to disagree that flexibility and "sloppiness" needs to be accomodated otherwise systems will end up brittle and/or unusable. Ironically this is also what the XML/RDF structures over HTTP activities are all about - bringing in more meaning to reduce dependence on syntax. So:

• Is this just the speedbump before the benefits shine through?
• Is there something fundamentally wrong here?

I have to agree with the sentiment that in the long run more structure is useful/needed. The idea that a few keywords over HTTP does the job is appealing but is flawed in the long run if what expect anything other than humans to configure/code/setup the understanding of the results. The semantics of a message can be defined explicitly (in formal languages which define the meanings of combinations of elements of a message) or implicitly in the processors at either end of the message stream. As long as we have plenty of human engineers at either end talking to each other on how to build those processors (and carry out the actions associated with each keyword) we can survive without making everything explicit. But if we want to reason about the meaning in an automatic way, you need to have everything explicity - which general means complex structures.

Probably at the moment we are falling between two stools - to complex to be really useful to humans and not well defined / implemented enough to really process automatically.

On the other hand Adam's Bosworth's plea for simplicity tells us something else - certain formats catch on if they are flexible and useful - people generally work out how to use them later. Something the Semantic Web still needs to get right...

SOAP and UDDI taking time

Another good tip from SOA today pointing to stories questining the uptake of SOAP and the necessity of UDDI. This is one of the key problems of large-scale interoperability - you only value what everybody else uses - the less cases there are of people interconnecting between their own services and those deployed by others they less important the standards are. Interestingly work in the Semantic Web Services (e.g. WSMO / SWSI) community is pushing in exactly the opposite direction - more structure not less - is this wise? Or better - how can people be persuaded to use it, probably the only answer is when there are tools available that are as simple as the simplest alternative.

Area67

One of the great things about picking a random/esoteric name is that you get to be number 1 on Google i the blick of an eye - just above what seems to be a physical Area67. Worryingly Area66 and Area68 seem to have been misplaced - but there is at least and Area69 next door.

Anyway I kinda like the neighbours :-).

Who gets the credit (or blame) for Web Service / Service Oriented Architectures

The SOA blog asks the interesting question Who gets the credit (or blame) for Web Service / Service Oriented Architectures with reference to Dion Hinchcliffe's post on the subject. Probably this is a question that can't be fully answered since at least in the case of Software Oriented Architectures the overall vision is pretty generic and the influences many (perhaps for Web Services per-se its easier - although arguably even there a great deal is borrowed from precursors such as OMG's CORBA). Here's my post on Dion Hinchcliffe's blog:

The timeline provided here is a good chart of technologies - however it seems to me that you have to look a lot further back for the core concepts/paradigms of Service oriented Architectures. Work in Agent technology research (e.g. see conferences such as AAAI, IJCAI and AAMAS amongst others) has long maintained a view of computing systems consisting of collections of distributed service provider/consumer systems. This is likely true of other fields such as distributed systems.

From 2000 onwards for example the Agentcities european projects (http://www.agentcities.org/EURTD) build up a large scale testbed o automated service providers / consumers running in a public/open environment which were able to discover one another, interoperate and form applications. The largest demonstration took place in 2003 (http://www.agentcities.org/note/00001/actf-note-00001a.pdf) but the first messages in the network were sent in 1999/2000. The technologies were not WSDL, SOAP etc. (they used specifications from the now little know Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents - FIPA / http://www.fipa.org) - but the concepts essentially the same as current SOA models.

The current W3C Web Services Architecture bears a lot of similarities to the FIPA Abstract Agent Architecture (published in http://www.fipa.org/specs/fipa00001/ 2000-2001) - not entirely surprising since there are some common authors.

And probably we need to go back even further at higher levels - such as to Hewitt's Open Systems papers.

Redpeace?

Looks like Greenpeace needs to think about openning an Interplanetary protection dvision.

Rent or Buy

It's hard to disagree with the register's analysis of the value for money rental on-line music stores like Napster provide - this seems to have been (and still is?) the big plan behind current evolutions in the music/film publishing business: push video on demand, push music on demand, get away from ownership.

An observation that the reg doesn't make: - what if i stick with my $249.99 20GB music player that leaves me $538 to spend on actual (physical) CDs instead of Napster OR iTunes. Even if we guess generously they cost on average more than $9.99 via iTunes - say $14.99 - we still get 36 albums (instead of 49 on iTunes) BUT we own them, we can copy them, rip them, change media, ... sell them second hand.

Except maybe in 5 years time we won't be able to buy CD's with those rights anymore - at least for new music. DVD's are alreayd more restrictive. Copy protected "CD's" are already more restrictive. In a dream scenario for music companies CD's sales would be phased out to be replaced entirely by digital delivery and renting - music on demand. Then we would all be paying for a lifetime.

Open File formats

Interesting developments from Microsoft on file formats. T o me there seems to be another large elephant in the room - the fact that the restriction to A) reading and B) "government document" effectively kills any market for a second viable tool to read/write the microsoft format - it would likely not be commercially viable to build such a thing.

It's easy to understand why Microsoft might want to do this - but does it meet the requirement that public documents are truely in an "open" format?

Long time no posts

Well - 10 days, but I have a fair excuse since i was out of the office in Cuba and Mexico. Unsurprisingly the world did not stand still in the meantime - Interesting stuff:

• A nice article on Service Oriented development in Java (found from Chris Leehman's blog)
• Roger Sessions (Objectwatch) on ACM Queue talking about the difference between Objects and Services which touches on interesting issues of trust in distributed object/service systems - do you trust yourself? Of course yes? or maybe no (not with jet lag anyway)...
• Some hope for speedier SOAP.
• Optimism about service oriented architectures is set to reach new highs... but i can't help thinking that this hype is rather pointless - the general concepts of service oriented systems are pretty straight forward and have been around a long time (as has knowledge of the inherent challenges). It seems inevitable they will emerge one way or another - but its far from clear how we go from the abstract notions to systems which really live up to the promise.
• Legged robots become obsolete (tip and story from the New Scientist - unfortunately the company's server seems to have been nuked by the attention...).
  

The prize for innovative project of the week goes to the liquid web - try liquid CNN. Interesting but it would seem a whole lot more interesting if A) annotations and changes were linked to their authors (so you could find out "who" you were reading, B) you could filter changes socialy to get a view containing only edits by people you identify with and C) it used common domain models and terms from the semantic web to better identify meaning of terms/items.

And finally is this the beginning of distraction? (well ok - maybe not :-)