Info Interop
Long absence. Unexcused. Who’s keeping track?
I have
been thinking about the intellectual barriers to information
interoperability. Practitioners in technology are bound, some would
argue, by reality or experience, but I would argue by tradition and
experience. This translates into a measurable acceptance and
open-mindedness about technologies such as EJB but the same crowd
dismisses technologies like JINI without a second thought. Ignore the
commercialization of these for a moment and focus on their
similarities. Both provide services and the ability to locate
services. EJB provides this in an almost parochial manner, focusing on
staticish configurations with purportedly increased levels of determinism. JINI on the other hand takes a more laissez-faire approach. Not worse. Not technically inferior. Not inherently less reliable. Just not as prescribed.
Now
before the masters of EJB come after me, arguing that EJB is dynamic
etc, my point is really that the manner in which a problem is solved
using EJB and JINI are different to the extent that each technology
exposes a different model for facilitating communication, a different
model for robustness and a different approach to determinisim.
I
would argue that most technicians today have difficulty with accepting
that the JINI way is better, much less even practical. This has
everything to do with models of familiarity, not demonstrated technical
superiority. People are comfortable with the CICS model where things are
there. The question of them not being there is not dealt with
directly. (It may very well be by DR and network and guys with short
ties, but not by developers). JINI proposes that a service with
certain capabilities may
exist, find out, it may not be the one that
you expected, in fact it may not even be there, deal with it, sometimes
bad things happen.
Whoa….my goal was not to deal with EJB
vs JINI, but rather to propose that a very similar phenomenon exists
with data and information representation. Developers flock to XML
because on the one hand it is indeed a vast improvement in many cases
for representing structured information but it retains the comfort
zone of header files, copybooks, IDL definitions, etc. The
epistemological boundaries of XML as data container are well understood
or not deeply contemplated at all.
Moving to the next level
I
would like to explore the development of a pragmatic knowledge
representation model that supports automated disambiguation and
seamless translation services. Users of this framework would be able
to build applications that interoperate at a semantic level with other
applications.
We will explore representational
technologies, select an approach, construct some sample domain examples
and work on a framework to support translation and interoperability.