The pillars of integration - a shaky foundation

The pillars of integration - a shaky foundation

EAI and other integration technologies assume the existence of information silos that need to be integrated. This is the accepted wisdom today. More and more complexity is built on this assumption, when the problem is really the information silos. Building more complexity on top of complexity does not make the problem go away, rather it makes the problem more complex.

Instead of trying to integrate complex silos of information - should we not be considering why the silos exist in the first place? If the problem of the isolated silos of information was removed integration would be significantly simpler. Make information easily accessible, then applications can become transient creations, the whole dynamic of the enterprise changes.

I believe this is where the next wave of innovation will come from, it is a wave we desperately need!

Shape of Blog Space

Shape of Blog Space

This morning I took a little detour in blog space off my usual track and spent an enjoyable 45 minutes wandering around in various minds. Having been reading "Linked: The New Science of Networks by Albert-László Barabási " recently ( highly recommended for those of you interested in networks), I thought there may be a semantic map in blog space that relates to the map of the Internet.

If we want build software to optimally extract, collate and present the thoughts of blog space we really need to understand the semantic map. Otherwise we will again be reduced to brute force approaches to the problem of the information explosion. This would I think be a step backwards as there are a many interesting views being presented in the blogverse. Perhaps this is a good focus for the current RSS/RDF debate which appears to be a debate over style rather than substance. If there was a real problem that needed to be solved the debate will become more concrete.

So I pose the problem, can RSS move towards a semantic mapping tool from a headline aggregator, could we use it to fly through a conceptual map of blogspace. The possibilities seem endless if I have hooks to tag RSS descriptions I can create my own personal conceptual map, getting a little far out there can we start to extract true meaning from our collective thoughts. There raw material is there, we create it everyday it just needs the infrastructure to make sense of it.....

Reliable Web Services

Reliable Web Services

While I agree to Jon Udell's posting Reliable Web Services that web services will converse in a loosely coupled asynchronous manner. I do disagree that this requires message orientated middleware to happen. Reliable message delivery is a function of the protocol among the nodes not the transport, i.e., you can build reliable messaging using UDP Tibco/Rendezvous or over HTTPR, I have even seen JMS over HTTP. Therefore to make SOAP more reliable it is more around defining the semantics of the interaction rather than the protocol that SOAP is bound to. This is similar to JMS, which is an interface rather than a protocol and the messaging semantics are defined at an abstract level allowing the implementers to use any appropriate transport.

It is going to be interesting to see if web services develop in to a rich set of XML standards for messaging or does it become relagated to being a hitchhiker on a reliable transport.

Like minds leading to Polarized Societies?

Like minds leading to Polarized Societies?

I received some positive feedback from Stephen Dulaney (thanks Stephen) after I linked to his blog. This started the thought process of how communities form, I linked to his blog because we appeared to share the same interests, read similar books, and I found his entries insightful. One of the issues, if we all start linking to similar minds, is do we create polarized virtual societies. Therefore should we all create “anti-minds” lists and compel ourselves to read them once a day – in Roman times when a victorious general was given a triumph a slave rode in his chariot whispering in his ear “you are still a mortal”, something to bear in mind as we all join/create like minded communities.