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Suggested Roadmap from the FEA to SOA/SIA

Management of Change Conference, Hyatt at Penn’s Landing, Philadelphia, PAWorkshop - 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 InformationU.S. Environmental Protection Agency

May 25, 2005

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Overview• 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.

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Overview

• 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. SOA’s 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.

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Comments• 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 Council’s Web Services Working Group to now the Chair of the CIO Council’s Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP) which should explain something about the evolution of my interests.

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Comments• 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.”

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Suggested 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:

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Suggested 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.

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Suggested Roadmap

Simple Composite Infrastructure

Organizational

Technical

Semantic

Dimensions of Interoperability

Evolution of the SOA Platform

Line of Sight

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Suggested 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 Council’s 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.

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Suggested 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 government’s 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.

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Suggested 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

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Suggested 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.