TRENT

Data-Driven Documents

2011-11-07T21:38:00.001+01:00

Data-Driven Documents. What's that?

D3.js is a small, free JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data.

You have a data source requires visualization and a chart library is not enough for that purpose. This little library helps you to develop the visualization using the DOM model and data driven transformation.

A good example of whats can be done is available here: http://www.visualizing.org/full-screen/16266

Reactive documents

2011-10-24T22:55:00.001+02:00

Stumbled upon a JavaScript library to simplify the creation of reactive documents, called Tangle.

Whenever you have to explain scenarios / alternatives in a sensible manner a reactive document is one possible way to do so. Changing a parameter and directly see the impact for all dependent parts of the information / document is a very sufficient way to teach certain problems / solution scenarios.

This library makes the creation very simple (from a technical point of view) and you are able to concentrate on the content scenario which is of course the harder part.

XQuery - rare used but ramp-up gets easier

2011-10-24T22:33:00.001+02:00

A very nice overview of what XQuery is, what are the relation to other XML based standards and why it is still very rare used is summarized here http://grtjn.blogspot.com/2011/10/xquery-novelties-revisited.html.

Once you want to dive into XQuery a bit deeper, get a feeling if the approach is sufficient for your use case you should try out BaseX. A XML database, open source. The main advantage for tryouts which are not available on alternative solution is a lightweight but very useful UI fronted for the content stored in the database.

Adding XML documents, try out queries and see how / what they match and last but not least a noticeable view of how information in a XML store looks like (from a conceptional point of view) comes aligned with easy install and ramp-up costs.

Alternatives (commercial and open source) are collected here: http://trent-intovalue.blogspot.com/2010/08/xquery-design-patterns.html

Valuable Information

2011-09-13T23:34:00.001+02:00

Today I stumbled upon the following twitter post:

Every human intervention in a business process introduces a 4% chance of error. - B. Beims

Sounds interesting and relevant in the context I'm working in. Than I tried to verify the source and basis for this statement.

Using google to search for the statement
Using google to search for the author
Finding second / third source for this statement

To be honest I wasn't able to verify what I have to verify and therefore use any bit of this information. Therefore I take this statement as a trigger for this blog post - better than nothing.

That is a example of todays most common topic today:

more and more "characters" are accessable and flowing around the world, like "Chinese whispers" posted, re-posted, extended, ....
less and less of the accessible" information" (in terms of percent based on the complete available total amount of "information") is relevant or valid
Shorten / context less "information" does not lead to human usable information chain

That is just a fact and reality - everyone has to deal with. To improve your personal ability to make "characters" to "information" you still have to go the hard way:

Don't use and post a information which is not verified by at least

a second, independent source
or
personal verification
or
background information which provides you with considerable background to trace the information

If you do not have time for this kind of verification - just leave the "characters" as they are and mark them as irrelevant for you. This should make your personal information chain much cleaner and helps you to divide relevant from irrelevant information.

Don't forget: It is never cheap to gather valuable information. It was never and will never.

Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape our world

2011-09-04T22:39:00.000+02:00

http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world.html

Writing code in most cases does not mean that you can ever control the usage and implication of the results.....

HTML5 and XML

2011-09-04T20:54:00.002+02:00

HTML5 will be the main syntax for the Internet in the next few years and will replace the today most frequently used HTML 4.01. Main driver for this shift was Google and is now adapted by all major browser / OS vendors and organizations.

The main advantage of HTML5 are the new amount of build in features which reflect most of the todays common requirements for web based applications.

Why XHTML 1.0/1.1 failed so far? It mainly was much to strict for the web community - the web and also the world is a non perfect place and therefore HTML5 is much more suitable to fit into this world than the XML based approach of XHTML can provide.

Does this mean XML for the web has loose and does not make sense at all. No there is still space for the XML based standards beside HTML5:

XHTML5
XML serialization of HTML 5 with stricter parsing rules
mime-type: application/xhtml+xml
Polyglot XHTML (see http://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/#polyglot-documents)

Major advantage of using XML to express the content on the web is a much more easier way to integrate the resulting content into XML processing chains using regular XML transformation tool chains.

Easier Reuse content for different channels using XSLT / XQuery
Retrieve content as XHTML and extract only dedicated parts (views) required for different use-case
Store and request the content using XQuery based infrastructure

The drawback is that today only the newest browser support the mime-type "application/xhtml" therefore for a while Polyglot XHTML might be a good opportunity to deliver the mass and keep processing use-cases doable.

A good summary of Polyglot XHTML and related XML based alternatives for HTML5 can be found here: http://www.xmlplease.com/xhtml/xhtml5polyglot/

analyse and process DTDs

2011-09-01T20:49:00.001+02:00

Working with DTD is still a common task for XML (/SGML) driven use-cases. Knowing this it is very amazing that there is no well know DTD visualization tool available supporting this task.

The good old "Near&Far Designer" is gone many years ago and the source is probably lost in the space of Open Text (the company bought Microstar Software Ltd in 1999). This tool is still in use by many organization having to deal with SGML DTDs (e.g. in the military or aircraft industry).

DTD documentation

There are a few open source scripts out there which converting a DTD into HTML pages for documentation purpose which are available free of charge:

DTDDoc
http://dtddoc.sourceforge.net/
LiveDTD
http://www.sagehill.net/livedtd/

There is one tool out there supporting graphical visualization, documentation and a few function to report key function within the given DTD:

TreeVision (http://www.ovidius.com/meta/download/treevision.html) from German company Ovidius. The tool is available free of charge and provides a very sufficient way to analyze XML / SGML DTDs.

Convert to XML Schema alternatives

If you have to process the content of a DTD for specific use-cases like analyzing the model based on custom specific rules the easiest way is to convert the DTD to RELAX NG (XML syntax) or W3C Schema language. Both are based on XML and therefore can be processed using regular XML based tools.

The best tool to do support this is trang (http://www.thaiopensource.com/relaxng/trang.html source is hosted on http://code.google.com/p/jing-trang/) initially created by James Clark. Compared to commercial alternatives the result is very predictable and for many use cases as good as possible.

DTDs will still exists for many years just because of the many legacy applications created around them. The amount of support is limited but still exists....

lost in email threads....

2011-08-01T20:02:00.000+02:00

One of the most time expensive daily tasks is to identify the email required for the the current task in mind.

You know that you already received a email for a particular topic and you want reference it, you require the technical details for a certain topic, ....

Using email tags and full text search of todays email clients is a quite sufficient help to get those kind of tasks done. But once you find a particular email, they is almost ever part of a thread back and forth and getting what you want requires to get the context of the found email. To get the complete context in emails thread isn't trivial, even with thread functions of the common email tools. Most of them are limited in what is shown in particular for long running threads:

you loosing the message context around the identified message because the threading function re-arrange the way your inbox is displayed
you don't have an easy to use visibility of what really happens, what are the timings for each mail in the task the corresponding sender
you do not have easy navigation without loosing the context

Few weeks ago I got aware of ThreadVis a add on for Thunderbird email client.

Pretty cool, it provides a visual graph of the email thread based on the currently selected email with different colors for different sender, length indication for time durations and direct popup help for the content of each item:

You see where you are, what was and after and who was the sender. Even threads you not receive are visible. A easy navigation between the emails, and popup previous for each of the thread items.

Viola, what else could you want? Of course there are things can be improved by the way the basic idea and implementation is worth to take a look at....

Open Source TMS: optentm2 / Open Source Localization framework: okapitools

2010-11-01T01:35:00.003+01:00

The open standards in the world of localization becoming more and more mainstream. XLIFF as the main data model to carry localized information between the different automated and manual steps within the localization process, TMX as a format to exchange translation memories, ... the full list of standards can be find here http://www.opentag.com/okapi/wiki/index.php?title=Open_Standards.
This enables more and more open source or free available tools to support certain steps in the localization process without dealing with proprietary and complex formats and conventions.
Few weeks ago the new project "opentm2" released first stable release. Based on IBM TranslationManager this infrastructure claims:

OpenTM2 provides an open platform for managing translation related activities with enterprise level scalability and quality. It serves as an open yet comprehensive localization tool that provides that integration platform. Ultimately, the goal is to create a cost-efficient and high-quality localization deliverable.

Promising and goes into the same direction as GlobalSight mentioned in a previous post: http://trent-intovalue.blogspot.com/2009/05/open-source-tms-globalsight.html.
In addition infrastructure helps to automate common tasks in localization and dealing with the mentioned standards are available as open source. The project "Okapi framework" provides a pipeline and several useful steps in localization processes, like

read several input formats
http://www.opentag.com/okapi/wiki/index.php?title=Filters
common steps in localization process
http://www.opentag.com/okapi/wiki/index.php?title=Steps
connection to common translation resources (like TMS)
http://www.opentag.com/okapi/wiki/index.php?title=Connectors

In addition useful tools to e.g. test text segmentation rules based on SRX and provide a Java based infrastructure which can be embedded in your own application makes this framework something you should look at if you work for / in localization process.

Hopefully the story continues.....

Link: Image Search Tools

2010-11-01T00:50:00.001+01:00

Short post for useful list of image search tools posted here "7 Image Search Tools That Will Change Your Life". With the help of such tools you might be able to find images and not only search for it.....

DITA - Beyond OT

2010-11-01T00:30:00.003+01:00

DITA-OT (Open Toolkit) is the reference implementation to transform DITA source into various output formats. The reference implementation is open source and maintained by increasing community:

The OT using Apache ANT as pipeline infrastructure. Thats OK in general, but there are several shortcomings once you have to integrate or extend the OT implementation for enterprise use cases (see e.g. discussion "Pipeline refactoring", "Diving Into Performance Improvements").
Because DITA-OT is "only" a reference implementation there might be other implementation out there already using a better approach because they started development once the limitation of the OT implementation already known?
Yes there are two available I'm aware of with different key aspects:

XMLmind DITA Converter (see http://www.xmlmind.com/ditac/what_is_ditac.html)

Key Aspects: Easier use, integration and improved output.
Reality: Bad and monolithic design with hard coded java based pipeline and a small user community. No real advantage compared to existing DITA-OT.
DITA XProc Pipelines (see https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-8740)

Key Aspects: greater flexibility, extensibility, portability, performance.
Reality:
Implementation based on XProc (XML Pipeline Language). The design is one step in the right direction and shows the much higher scalability (functional and non functional) of this design, e.g. in case you want to use a extended semantics for validation you can add ISO-Schematron based rules for validation using existing "ISO Schematron schema for DITA" stylesheet and build-in "p:validate-with-schematron" step in XProc and add it into the existing pipeline.

This implementation isn't perfect, it mainly use XProc markup for the implementation which makes the code long and hard to read / maintain. The usage of the right language for each step which is one advantage of XML pipelining isn't consequent implemented in this implementation. Based on currently available XProc Engines (http://tests.xproc.org/results/) this implementation is not yet ready for enterprise but this will change in the near future the more real world examples are available and used in production.

The XProc based approach is promising and maybe in the future the DITA-OT development also switch over to real XML pipelining. This makes any kind of integration and extension much easier than it is today.....

Usage of Wolfram|Alpha

2010-09-21T22:38:00.002+02:00

Wolfram|Alpha started round about 1,5 years ago with big noise in the IT related press. Their goal to make "systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone" (see http://www.wolframalpha.com/about.html) was promising from the beginning.

Up to now they make huge progress and their engine is a sufficient help for everyone using a computer on a daily basis.

Each day you have to answer question requires specific knowledge or algorithm. In many cases you can find specific Websites helping to answer those questions. But having one source, answer those questions, combine the results for as many domains as Wolfram|Alpha do is unique on the Net (AFAIK).

Samples

I have to offer 10,000 USD, how much is this in EUR?
Simple type e.g. "convert 10000 USD to EUR" - viola.
I want to arrange a telco with someone in Shanghai on a given date / time?
Simple type e.g. "12.10.2010 16:00 in Shanghai" - viola.
What is the human readable date / time for a given unix timestamp?
Simple type e.g. "unix timestamp 130464000 to cet" - viola.
Infos for a given Website
Simple type e.g. "www.orbeon.com"
What the hack was port 541 used for
Type "port 541"
...you see what I mean?

Once you want to use or share a certain query you can create a so called widget and bookmark it, embed it into your website, .....

creating a wizard to convert any given unix timestamp to a given named timezone (specific query shown above) i created the following widget (it takes me 10 min. of my limited time ;-)

Limitation

There are still lots of limitations, e.g. for many knowledge domains only US based sources are available. The combination of knowledge is still limited, a fancy query, like "weather the day Jimmy Hendrix died" does not work for many scenarios right now. But they getting better each day....

The end of power point....

2010-09-21T00:36:00.000+02:00

My previous post (see http://trent-intovalue.blogspot.com/2010/09/end-of-documents.html) shows that a linear sequence of information is not a perfect match for the expression of complex technical content.
That is also true for presentations which are often supported by power point slides. If you already tried to introduce a complex topic and interact with the audience you might now that the right information is always a slide away.

Why all office application re-create power point instead of thinking of more flexible concepts? I'm not really sure. Few days ago i stumbled upon Prezi which tries to goes a different route. The content is organized in a tree of topics and navigation is much more focused on context / audience and concrete situation.

Sample:

Why should you move beyond slides? on Prezi

This application is no silver bullet and not perfect at all but at least shows that different concepts of software based presentations are possible.

The end of documents....

2010-09-21T00:10:00.000+02:00

Assumption

If you have to describe any technical subject you are aware that knowledge is hard to express in a straight linear sequence of information topics. In most cases you have to structure the information into information tropics and semantic connection between those => a network of information topics.

Nothing new and a trivial statement, you might say. All semantic concepts are using those principle buildup.

Yes, but why most technical subjects are still using documents or slide shows to express technical subjects?
Those media formats are linear by design. The reader has to follow the one and only linear flow defined by the author of the document. In the best case the author is able to find one of the sufficient linear paths through the network of information and the reader is therefore able to understand the described subject. But even in this case getting the hole picture, identify ways to extend the provided information, embed it to different subject etc. isn't possible or at least requires to re-construct the information tree in mind.

Ask yourself why you are using

A word processing software to define project information (requirements, design specification, test specification, ....)
Power Point to introduce a particular problem domain
A word processing software to trace a result of a workshop (also known as workshop protocol)
....

The answer is simple. Because we simple get used to and there are no mainstream alternative media formats out there which can be used without at least one significant constrain (effort to implement and train, difficult to share, ....). The complete office suites still remains rooted in the old linear concepts. Even new players in this business adapting this paradigm (e.g. Google Docs).

Alternatives?

I'm pretty sure that in the future documents will be replaced with applications which providing a way to describe topics as short topics and makes it easy to connect those topics with semantic links (e.g. depends on, contains, .....). A document in this scenario is just one path through the network of information for one particular use case. This kind of application can replace todays word processing software without loosing any important feature.

In the domain of technical writing topic based authoring (e.g. using DITA information architecture) becomes more and more popular. The main use case there is to (re-)use information as much as possible to reduce creation and information maintenance costs. In my point of view that is "only" a important side effect of having the content defined in a much more usable form. Not a linear sequence of information reflecting a group of authors view but as more or less complete set of information topics linked together. The todays results are still linear documents of some format (pdf, online help formats, ....) but that only corroborate the belief that linear documents are mainstream.

Open Issue

The usability of topic based authoring isn't sufficient today. It is more or less a hand crafted creation of enriched information. To dive into the mainstream usability is the most important factor. The creation and linking of information must be at least as easy as using e.g. Mind Mapping tools (e.g. FreeMind, MindManager) combined with easy to use structured topic content editor (e.g. tools like Xopus or XMAX goes into this direction).

There’s more to come? Lets see....

Open Source CCMS

2010-08-17T19:18:00.002+02:00

stumbled upon Calenco a open source (AGPL) CCMS (for further infos about the different kind of available CMS domains, see my post: http://trent-intovalue.blogspot.com/2010/03/stumbled-upon-microsoft-sharepoint-cms.html).
From the list of features published on their website it looks promising. It seems to me the first CCMS application available as open source. I not verified the application so far but I definitely will. Basic features of course but in case such a application get a strong user and developer community the business case for the small CCMS vendors might be tricky. Will see...
The now implemented support for DITA 1.1 and Docbook 4 and 5. The amount of covered feature is also a matter for the verification.

usage of open source

2010-08-11T22:34:00.002+02:00

Working in software development domain focused on XML processing you have many major and stable open source infrastructure to use.

But how do you decide to use a certain project for your specific needs? you have to consider the following basic questions:

what is the goal of the project and does it match to the goal of your usage?
If you are not able to answer the question or if both goals doesn't match the roadmap is likely to mismatch => you cannot participate on improvements and in same cases are no more able to upgrade to newer version.
how big is the user community?
the more people using the project the more use-cases are implemented and considered to be stable
Is your use case similar to a significant group of the user community?
same rational as in point one and two
How many active developers working on the project?
The activity multiplied with the amount of developers divided by the size of the project gives you an impression how mature the current code is and how sufficient development will be

note: big is no value for itself. a small but focused developer community sometimes is a better choice as long as their interest for the project stays stable
How active is the development?
Same rational as above
Does the license fits to my use-case or company policy?
And of course the most important one: does the project fits to my system requirements?

How to get those information? You can investigate the projects website, taking with the project community, the developers. And you might use Ohloh (http://www.ohloh.net/) which is a community for open source developers provides information around open source projects, the code and the community. Great source for open source....

XQuery Design Patterns

2010-08-11T21:37:00.000+02:00

Nice summary of XQuery Design Patterns (see http://patterns.28msec.com/). This side also contains a link to a online XQuery engine based on Zorba (see http://try.zorba-xquery.com/).

The real power of XQuery comes with a database hosting the data for dynamic retrieval and processing. Today there are several databases out there supporting XQuery processing, even as open source.

Open Source

eXist (http://exist.sourceforge.net/)
XQuery sandbox here http://demo.exist-db.org/exist/sandbox/sandbox.xql
sedna (http://modis.ispras.ru/sedna/)
XQuery sandbox here http://wikixmldb.org/xq/
BaseX (http://www.inf.uni-konstanz.de/dbis/basex/)
XQuery sandbox here http://phobos101.inf.uni-konstanz.de/basex/demo
brandnew TNTBase (http://tntbase.org/)
XQuery sandbox here http://alpha.tntbase.mathweb.org:8080/tntbase/ores/Try.html
uses Subversion and the Berkley DB XML. This implementation adds more XML processing infrastructure which intends to be a XML Pipelining infrastructure including a XML database.
Oracle Berkeley DB XML (http://www.oracle.com/us/products/database/berkeley-db/index-066571.html)
There is a commercial version available as well.

Commercial

The big 3 relational db vendors (MS, Oracle, IBM) provide XQuery support. This approach combines relational storage of xml fragments and is therefore only suitable in certain use-cases
MarkLogic (http://www.marklogic.com/)
the most powerful XML DB currently available in my point of view.
no online sandbox available, but a free developer edition can be downloaded from http://developer.marklogic.com/products
....

Why, What and How

2010-05-17T00:00:00.002+02:00

If you want to define a RFP (Request for Quotation) / RFP (Request for Proposal) or you have to answer those requests you are forced to define or understand requirements for a particular product or solution.

There are lot's of good sources showing how to write and handle requirements. But often they miss one important fact which makes either the creation, prioritization and understanding of requirements much easier. The Why instead of the What.

Rational

First set the baseline for effectiveness. (Why)
Than define what you need to be effective. (What)
And at the end define the efficiency. (How)

What is the rational, the reason for a particular requirement. If you try to understand the Why or if you forced to define the Why the resulting requirements / usage of the requirement are much more valid than without doing this.

The "What" does not tell anyone the real intention of a solution. The why provides the motivation and business value and therefore the baseline for effectiveness which makes or makes not a requirement right to exists.

ToDo

Before you start to define any requirement try to define the major "Whys" you intent to solve. Keep in mind that there must no requirement which cannot be derived from those high level whys.
derive each use-case / requirement from one of the major why areas and add a specific rational for the individual use-case / requirement.
classify / prioritize the requirements based on the rational.
Derive the "How". In this step the statement of efficiency is the key for selection of the right solution.

Result

The defined requirements are much easier to understand and alternatives can be much easier identified and qualified.
Prioritization can be much easier coordinated to management because the consequence of a decision for the "Why" and therefore the company / department goals are always clear even if someone does not have detailed knowledge of the subject matter.

=>ensure effectiveness
Definition of the system requirements / How can focused on efficiency.
=>ensure efficiency

To see the same idea from sales / marketing point of view watch: Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action.

facebook - openbook

2010-05-16T22:22:00.000+02:00

if you have a facebook account or knowing people having account, try http://youropenbook.org/. I'm always amazed about the data people commit to companies like facebook.

try it out as long as it is available.

XSLT Version 2.1

2010-05-16T21:14:00.005+02:00

XSLT Version 2.1 Draft published. As mentioned in the published draft the main goal is making streaming of transformation easier for implementors.

Streaming makes life easier whenever you have to process huge input streams of information to reduce memory footprint and deliver already processed chunks to the next consumer before the complete stream is successful processed.

On the other hand XSLT 2.0 which is a recommendation since 3 years is not widely adopted from implementors of XSLT engines -- Saxon, AltovaXML and few commercial ones-- so far.

Why? The main reason is complexity compared to the corresponding benefit. The implementation of a XSLT engine passes the 2.0 conformance tests is expensive and complex compared to the benefit for most users / use-cases. As in any commercial product each new feature / requirement should be qualified against the value and cost / effort it brings into the standard.

The interesting question would be -- how to measure benefits of a feature? How to interview the "users" of a standard? There is no trivial answer and that might be the main reason why standards tend to get over complex.

CMIS beta implementations

2010-04-19T19:46:00.000+02:00

good overview of existing CMIS implementations (client and server) can be found here:

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/lqwiki.nsf/dx/11122008094143AMWEBK95.htm

because CMIS version 1.0 is not final approved yet (see also http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=cmis) all of those implementations can be marked as "beta". Hopefully the progress of the standard will end up in a state different to what happens to WebDAV where the initial hype never made substantial progress in major and public available products and infrastructure components.

time will tell.....

CMS of what kind?

2010-03-08T22:45:00.002+01:00

stumbled upon "Microsoft SharePoint: The CMS Killer" blog post. A personal view how MS SharePoint fits for ECMS use cases.
The results might be wrong or write depending on what your understanding of CMS is.

Problem

There is no common understanding of the the term CMS and even not for the derived term ECMS.

Cause

CMS means Content Management System. Based on this definition it is a application (system) to manage content. Thats trivial but what does content really means? Content is all and everything. Most of the content can be managed within IT systems as well.

Illustration

General categories of content maintained by IT applications:

Structured content
Content maintained and structured as a collection of data (order or offer data). Content in this context means a collection of records with given structure
Those type of data are typical maintained with applications called ERP or other kind of systems of this type (e.g. ALM systems).
Unstructured content
Content maintained within documents. The content within the document is not addressable outside the application the document was created with (the semantic makes only sense in one specific usage scenario).
Those type of data are typical maintained with applications called DMS or Web-CMS (maintaining HTML) systems.

The propagation of xml introduce a third categorie of content:

Semi-structured content
Content used to create documents (information products) of some kind. The content within the document is addressable outside the application the document was created with.
OR
Content maintained as system independent instance of data (e.g. order or offer data).
In both cases XML is the common format today.

Each CMS has a history in one of the mentioned areas and has its specific strength and weakness for usage in different domains.

The corresponding consultants knowing the mentioned issue and trying to create domain specific names for specific usage of systems

DBMS
Main goal is to maintain relational data and used by dedicated applications on top.
DMS
Main goal is to maintain documents
Web-CMS
Main goal is to maintain intranet / extranet / internet sites
ECMS
Enterprise-CMS
Main goal is to provide enterprise ready workflow and records management on top of DMS feature set
CCMS
Component-CMS
Main goal is to maintain content stored in XML for single-source publishing
?
anything i missed, of course there are plenty of buzzwords / domains out there describing mixed-scenario usage.

Because non of the mentioned definitions are "formal approved" the specific vendors use the term with most customer attention in their target domain and each vendor tries to fulfill use-cases from other domains as well. Because each CMS has a particular implementation history the usage in most cases is limited even if the vendor claims to cover most of them.

Examples

a C-CMS vendor might support xml usage and publishing very well but does not scale if enterprise workflow or records management is required.
a ECMS vendor has enterprise BPM support build in but lacks of sophisticated xml semantic and functions.
a Web-CMS makes creating your Internet presence easy but lacks the usage of the same content for printed documents
.....

Summary

This reflects the current state of content management. I expect in the next few years that new and maybe existing systems will move into the semi-structured content area and some of them might succeed. They might reach the final goal that content can be create, maintain, re-purpose and publish based on different user communities from one single source.

Until that stage is reached....coming back to initial "Microsoft SharePoint: The CMS Killer" statement. Ask the author what kind of content use-case he has in mind and you can validate the statement.

we live for our customers....

2010-03-07T22:45:00.001+01:00

....really?

do you work with customer centric mindset?
do you work in a customer centric organization?

your first and quick answer might be yes, of course. my company does everything to make the customer happy, thats where our revenue comes from. of course.....

That was my first thought as well.

Than i looked at several websites incl. my own company one. you find service descriptions, white papers, success stories, awards -- everything focus to promote the own portfolio of services / products.

Have a look at your company's website. Looks it different?

To understand the customer means to understand their challenges, needs and questions they have. You have to answer the questions: what is the business value you can bring to your customer instead of leave them alone to select a specific product or service you offer.

What is the reason for that?

It is much harder to define and understand the problems your customer have and how you can provide business value for them using their terms and definition. Instead showing what you did and do and let the potential customer decide if that might help them is much easier.

By the way you will be much more successful if you at least try to think and follow the problems your potential customer have to solve....

top most dangerous programming errors

2010-03-07T20:48:00.000+01:00

the list "Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors" makes clear that the software domain still has much to learn. do you involved in software development projects either as project manager, software architect or software developer? if so you are sure that the mentioned errors not happen in your daily work or the subject of your daily work?

i think it is still much work to do until software development can be called a "proofed engineering discipline".

the more application will be hosted in the cloud the more such kind of issues will be mission critical for the target group of the application.

by the way the list is a good reminder of low level non functional requirements and topics for peer-review....

DITA DTD: tools to support specialization

2010-01-17T23:52:00.000+01:00

if you are new to DITA and want to create a custom DTD configuration with or without custom specialization this tool is a good starting point.

you may ask why, at least if you do not want to introduce custom semantic to your data model you should at least define which domain belongs to you. a summary why to go this way, read http://drmacros-xml-rants.blogspot.com/2007/04/dita-standard-practice-always-make.html.

Online version of "DITA DTD Generator" is available as online version. source code can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/dita-generator/.

If you have to support custom semantic (which is common in enterprise usage of DITA) you might use "DITA Visual Specialization Manager" or read "DITA Specialization Tutorial".

As always using the right tool is only the baseline. The more advanced task is to identify what you need based on your business case.

Negating Regexes

2010-01-17T20:16:00.001+01:00

a not so rare question using regex is "match all strings doesn't contain word foo". that isn't something regex is made for. by the way searching the web shows that the expression

(?:(?!REGEX).)*

where the expression REGEX must be replace with expression must be negated, e.g. (?:(?!(foo1|foo2)).)* returns true for all strings doesn't contain foo1 OR foo2.

more details and background can be found here: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=588315#588368

utilities, utilities

2010-01-09T21:44:00.001+01:00

daily work on Windows is pretty unproductive without so called utilities. small tools and extensions increase efficiency.

Hanselman Ultimate Tools List provides a good summary of utilities for Windows. Many of them i used as well for years.

agil development means valuable end user assistance

2010-01-01T21:10:00.002+01:00

gile development methods have become more and more popular during the last few years. Especially the software domain tries to speed up development cycles and deliver new features on demand of the customer. most common method today is SCRUM.
there are many good books, articles, forums and blogs out there describing the goal, advantage of diving into agile software development. but less or zero of them covering the creation of end user assistance, like online help, for the different users groups and additional, required information must be shipped with the product.

#1 principle of agile manifesto

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer
through early and continuous delivery
of valuable software.

"valuable software" of course means one the customer is able to use, therefore end user documentation is essential part of the software development process.

that means that you have to change your process to

no more write documents / additional information instead
write valuable information assigned or integral part of the product component it belongs to
a document is one potential output if a customer value can be achieved with this type of output
no more prioritize, test, deploy and measure customer feedback for the application and the user documentation as separate applications instead
while working on a particular feature prioritize, test and deploy all valuable user information and work together with the customer to get feedback for the complete application (incl. user documentation).

sounds simple, but as you know that isn't simple at all. many companies currently workaround the mentioned issues or just ignoring the resulting consequences.

by the way one of the few blog posts I found "Writing End-User Documentation in an Agile Development Environment".

what is your experience and solution to this challenge?

do you discuss end-user documentation requirements while sprint planning / review...?
do you prioritize end-user documentation along with the corresponding user story?
do you test your end user documentation while test your application?
....?
do you localize user documentation while localize your application?
do you use dedicated professional writes or other team members for creating end user related information products?
....?

predictions for 2010

2010-01-01T17:32:00.000+01:00

same procedure as every year but as Yogi Berra mentioned

It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.

so just stop trying to be one of currently 5,130,000 tries according to google or 12,600,000 according to bing.

In this sense --

The ultimate function of prophecy is not to tell the future, but to make it. Your successful past will block your visions of the future.

Joel A. Barker

Software Globalization

2009-12-28T21:27:00.002+01:00

Software Globalization is always a big deal and to be honest i do not know many software application with more or less shortcomings in this area. Globalization consists of Internationalization (preparing the application that they can be adapted to different locales) and Localization (translation of content for a specific locale).

you have to deal with locale specific

messages
dates
numbers and currencies
replacements
conversions
encodings
sorting / collation
test bounderies
layouts
.....

most of them seems to be easy for 95% of the use-cases but getting 100% done is at least tricky once you do not have the corresponding and suitable software infrastructure.

the best open source library in this domain I'm aware of is ICU. As always a software tool does not solve the problem itself it just gives you a solid base once you understand what needs to be done ;-)

related links:

who has locked my account?

2009-06-14T18:35:00.003+02:00

if you have to identify on which windows client / server a given account is currently logged on sysinternals utility "psloggedon" is your friend.

a simple "psloggedon account" identifies all computers the given account is currently logged on (and part of the same domain you start this command).

this tool is part of sysinternals huge amount of useful tools and command line helpers which helps to answer or identify common maintenance issues, like

does my application doesn't close all used handles
Process Explorer
which resources (filesystem, registry, ...) does my application access
Process Monitor
capture of debug output (traces using OutputDebugString, DbgPrint) without using a debugger
DebugView
.....

and all utilities are free. the team creating and maintaining those utilities are now part of Microsoft. up to now this has any negative effect to utilities they provide beside there is no source code available anymore which prevents to see how certain information can be / must be retrieved to be on the safe side.

transform pdf to word / excel

2009-06-12T23:49:00.003+02:00

online conversion from pdf to word / excel is available from http://www.pdftoword.com/. you have to upload your pdf and will receive the converted word / excel file as long as the result is smaller than 12 MB. result looks good for most use-case. of course you have to manual rework based on the intension you have with the result but content, images and layout is converted and accessable for subsequent tasks.

i like that kind of advertising - a easy to use subset of the functionality is available for free and if i like the feature and want more enterprise features i will probably pay the price.

ux tools for windows

2009-06-12T19:31:00.005+02:00

useful unix tools (e.g. grep / find) for windows are available here
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/
advantage compared to cygwin you can use them right from the windows command line without any additional layer.

make usage of command line much easier....

(re)use of content

2009-06-07T23:27:00.004+02:00

(re)use of content is a common topic in almost each domain has to deal with content. the rational is obvious and easy: use of existing content is faster and cheaper than creating new one.

there are two major requirements to (re)use content:

you need a business object the content belongs to
otherwise it is impossible to identify existing content and determine if this content is worth to use
you need a well defined information type the content belongs to
only if you know what type of content you have to create allows you to identify if it may already exist

based on those two trivial requirements you can define rules in which case (re)use is possible:

if existing content is created for the same business object and for the same information type as the new content you have to create.

to extend this scenario you can deviate your content from existing one if either the business object or information type is also derivate from the content you intend to use.

to derivate a test case from corresponding use case is obvious and valid as long as the business object both belonging to are the same. if a certain engine exists in three variants each derivate from a common building block the corresponding content is obvious also valid to use and derivate.

as you see usage of content requires both knowledge and connection to the business and to the content itself.
because of this many (re)use scenario fails in the real world (look into your own domain -- do you satisfy with your content (re)use?)

if you look at the two dimension enables usage of content you might understand that in many cases the usage of content between companies might be higher than the usage of content within one company. in many cases competitors dealing with similar business objects and information types beside different departments within one company might not.

this means that if the information types are not critical for a certain domain cross domain usage of content will become a possibility once the information itself is interchangeable (thats a topic for its own).

usage of translation is one of the most obvious scenario for cross company usage. because translation becomes more and more a cost center but is also a business driver the usage of common translation memories between companies working in the same domain is of course thinkable. content already translated for nokia might be used by sony as well, same is true for BMW and Daimler.

the "Language Data Exchange Portal" shows how this might work. each member provides content and funding and can participate from the complete pool of data available. as better the content is classified as better the results each company has......more to come?

Google Wave: backbone for real information collaboration

2009-06-02T00:24:00.004+02:00

beside Microsoft still working on getting search on existing information done (last try http://www.bing.com/) Google tries to re-invent the creation, usage and collaboration of information with upcoming "Google Wave".

having a deeper look into the already available information the most interesting part of the design is that the complete architecture is based on hosted information transformation based on a group of humans and automated participants. the overall architecture looks clean and the demo provided here: http://www.youtube.com/v/v_UyVmITiYQ&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0 looks promising.

such kind of infrastructure has the capability to be used in all kind information centric workflows especially those happens in the "cloud". creation and further development of engineering artifacts from customer requirements to user stories to design documents and testing artifacts up to the usage of the same information in technical docs created for them. such workflow always requires a information object centric architecture and in addition collaboration feature sets.

we have to see if Wave will succeed, means if developer comunity contribute and use the existing extension points if so, i'm looking forward to see what can be done with this promising infrastructure.....

in my point of view the future of information goes away from document paradigm and end up in the a more message oriented paradigm where a group of people work on structured / semi-structured information objects (messages / topics) and assemble them in a final stage in each business workflow to a document, web-page, calculation sheet, ..... this means a document is "just one output for one audience" and describe just one usage of the information at a certain time.

in those days search is still essential but just as one way to navigate through the specific information pool and only if the hits are relevant for further usage (try to search for "Microsoft" on www.bing.com and see if the provided hits are relevant enough for you.....)

see also:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/06/wave
http://mashable.com/2009/05/31/google-wave-features/

CMIS resources

2009-06-02T00:13:00.002+02:00

nice summary of background material about CMIS can be found here: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Draft_CMIS
especially the list of available provides and consumers are useful for those try to further investigate into this new standard effort. sample code says more than thousand words....

Open Source TMS: GlobalSight

2009-05-21T21:29:00.005+02:00

few days ago i stumbled over GlobalSight a open source TMS solution formally known as Ambassador.

the marketplace for TMS products are dominated by a few commercial vendors most of them doesn't make big money with those products.

why?

the translation / localization domain requires strong domain knowledge which isn't widespread especially the combination of IT knowledge and linguistic, translation and localization knowledge is hard to achieve.

in addition translation / localization today still means to process input files from pretty heterogeneous and in many cases proprietary file formats (e.g. HTML, Word, Framemaker, Quark, Excel, XML, software resources, .....), translate them and create output files using localized content and layout. that is one of the most appalling jobs you can think of as a developer.

in general XML can reduce the requirements for TMS but the majority of users are still not using XML based content creation and therefore are not able to use XML as data format for localization.

what does this mean for success of the solution GobalSight?

to be honest i do not expect huge developer community dive into further development or even contribution in this solution because of the reason mentioned above. only if additional companies (like those part of the mentioned Steering Committee) provide development resource to this project this can be more than "just another way to herald end of life of a not successful product"

different views?

cmis: Apache Chemistry

2009-04-27T23:24:00.004+02:00

good news on CMIS front. Apache incubating a new project called "Chemistry".

project description

Apache Chemistry is a generic Java language implementation of the upcoming OASIS CMIS specification.
Proposal

Apache Chemistry is an effort to provide a Java (and possibly others, like JavaScript) implementation of an upcoming CMIS specification, consisting of a high-level API for developers wanting to manipulate documents, a low-level SPI close to the CMIS protocol for developers wanting to implement a client or a server, and default implementations for all of the above. Chemistry aims to cover both the AtomPub and SOAP bindings defined by the CMIS specifications.

with success of this project there might be an open source CMIS reference implementation not coupled with a existing CMS and therefore has the change to on the one hand provide a potential good starting point for vendor specific integration work and on the other hand a reference makes the specification "real" and touchable.

see also:

win32 memory management

2009-04-27T00:53:00.002+02:00

i believe that one year from now 64bit operating systems are mainstream in server infrastructure. by the way currently there are still 32bit windows server / software out there. therefore it's time to understand limitation you leave behind using 64bit OS. so don't miss

EXtensions...xml processing

2009-04-27T00:19:00.004+02:00

you always faced with "missing features" if you working with existing standards.

two reasons for that:

the feature is specific to your domain or solution
the feature is common but for some reasons (and there might be good ones) didn't get it in the existing standard

for the second case common EXtensions might be the area you looking for. in the xml domain the following projects trying to define "standard extensions". this means that extending an existing standard out of the scope of the standard process itself but without loosing the portability of applicaton using the extensions.

projects

XPath
=> EXPath
XSLT 1.0
=> EXSLT
XSLT 2.0
=> see discussion about EXSLT 2.0
XQuery
=> EXQuery
XProc
=> EXProc

beside EXSLT which is well-known and already produced a sufficient amount of output all other EX communities are brand new and therefore doesn't provide any output so far.

watch and contribute......

Programming is Fun But Shipping is Your Job

2009-04-23T20:55:00.002+02:00

pretty old but always valid post on common shortcoming of developers.
one of the most critical part of each software project is to get the last 2 % of the job done. regardless which development process you choses (waterfall, agile, rup, ...) you are always faced to get the team focused until the stakeholders of the project are really happy (and not only the developers creating the assets).

identify content: powerful but tricky

2009-04-23T20:18:00.004+02:00

regular expression and xpath are two approaches to identify a matching subset of content within a given amount of content for further usage. the first one based on plain text the second one based on xml.

both are powerful but if you not using it on a day by day basis are tricky and error prone. error prone means that you have to avoid all edge cases where a given expression shouldn't match but it does or the other way around where a given expression should match but it doesn't.

if you work in XML related world you often need both approaches e.g. using XSLT or XQuery.

there are few commercial IDE's which helping out to develop the right expression for the required use case but there are two which i'm often use dedicated to help you dealing either with regular expressions or xpath

SketchPath

powerful standalone tool to create and verify xpath expression. support for xpath 2.0 and most features you ask for in this context. this tool is based on well-known Saxon for xpath 2.0 and .net subsystem for xpath 1.0

home: http://pgfearo.googlepages.com/

Regulator

powerful standalone tool to create and verify regular expression. with buildin regex analyser and on-the-fly validation, code generation (for .net and vb only), ....

download: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/regulator/Regulator20Bin.zip?modtime=1189740236&big_mirror=0

... too long.

2009-04-13T21:52:00.004+02:00

if you read

http://www.sharepointreviews.com/sharepoint-articles/104-sharepoint-workflows/480-how-long-is-a-sharepoint-project.html

i would say, too long. because i really do not have any statement of goal and expected improvements in the mentioned list.

last statement is at least strange:

If you add up the weeks in brackets you will see that it comes to 26 weeks which is six months. This is purely an estimate and project length really depends on the workload of the Project Team as well as the amount of data involved.

if only those two constrains are responsible for project length is do not expect any measurable outcome beside "making IT people and consultants happy"....

thats also a good example for "IT centric projects likely to fail"

save money means save money

2009-04-13T20:57:00.002+02:00

the following blog post from Mark Woeppel "Is Your Continuous Improvement Organization a Profit Center?" summarize one of the major misunderstanding of continuous improvement in many companies. not too much to add, beside that i can agree to the suggestion within the post based on personal experience.

same statements must be made for any (IT) project claim to improve existing processes. while working with the stakeholders to identify the scope, requirements and more important the rational for those i often hear the statement that a particular requirement / process change / feature improves the process and therefore saves money.

after the project is finished and in operation, the same amount of people with at least the same amount of budget working on the "improved process" and the upfront investment already gone. based on simple calculation, the company just loose money with such a project (even if the cause - see below - might be different).
that leads to continues and increasing management distrust in changes stated as "money saver" and subsequent projects are more likely to rejected from senior management.

why?

project scope or requirement's simple wasn't target oriented. means they do not really help to improve the overall process they more or less leads to "doing the same in a different way".
that is a common project failure and can be avoided if project / requirement / system management skills are improved or more simple by doing a better job. the project teams fails to address the goals.
other process parameters are changed as well. for example the process throughput increase, additional process outputs are created or budget / people now assigned to other activities within the same department to resolve bottlenecks in this areas, ....

the second one is the more important one, because this means that the change has an impact but the company isn't able to express / see this in terms of cash. means budget is simple moved from one service item to others.

how to avoid this?

divide the individual rationals for a project in measurable and independent topics and for each of them assign responsible person from senior management. means if a certain amount of requirement state to save money, the budget schedule for the period the result of the project is in operation must be reduced. if on the other hand upcoming new demands must be addressed those must be implemented in budget schedule as dedicated position.

sounds trivial, but believe me that does not happen very often in real world situations. the reason for this is simple -- it is a pretty hard work and sometimes not easy to define the saved money. This not only helps to get project agreed, provide traceability for senior management but also tries to get the bottom of the stated effect (which sometimes simple is not right which leads to effect described in 1. reason).

goal

the different goals and results can be traced and measured and if a project or few parts of a improvement projects intent to save money, you have to save money means you have to have reduced budget if the project succeed.

summary

save money must mean saved money at the end. All other "statements" and explanations are not valid especially in todays business context....

cash is kind

2009-04-13T00:05:00.002+02:00

"cash is king" is a principle that many companies today have to follow. this simple means all decision must follow to increase cash flow.

for all activities and departments of a company with no direct impact to the core business process this means that they are forced to immediate reduce their budget to a minimum / essential value.

HR, IT, TechDoc, .... are examples for affected units.

the current situation is not designed for mid or long term investments in the mentioned buisness areas which "only" improves long term operation. what you need is short term benefit without too much investment.

good opportunity for outsourcing, isn't it? i expect significant amount of companies try to reduce their supporting activities through outsourcing services even if the services doesn't fit 100% to their specific needs and the missing parts isn't essential for daily operation.

what do you need for service outsourcing:

service function must be fully defined (in technical context this means that the interface must be fully defined)
service availability must be defined
service security must be defined
=>what happens with the data maintained by a different organization?
service termination must be defined
=>what happens if service is moved in-house again or moved to different service provider?
price must be defined
=>pay per use / per time period / ?

having this in mind i expect increasing request to ASP / PaaS / SaaS / PRaaS buisness models and companies can provide such services in certain domains.

ASP
provide IT infrastructure (software & hardware) for daily operation for a dedicated amount of money.
=>IT assets based

PaaS
provide a dedicated platform to implement and host a application for a dedicated amount of money.
=>development asset based

SaaS
provide a dedicated set of software features for a dedicated amount of money.
=>software application / function based

PRaaS
provide a dedicated Process / Business function incl. the corresponding IT asserts for a dedicated amount of money.
=>business process based

the amount of semantic involved is increasing from top to down. therefore the potential value but also the potential risk for the requesting company increase. todays knowledge and IT infrastructure make usage of those business models not only possible for big, enterprise companies but also for mid and small size ones.

but beside few other points you still have to trust in trust if you want to go this direction.....

model a DITA compliant model

2009-04-12T22:22:00.007+02:00

DITA today is more and more adopted at least in the techdoc domain. the success and adoption rate is based on two major advantages over other existing standards:

adaptability
the DITA data model can be adapted based on defined rules to specific needs and domains. this concept is called specialization
modularization
content creation is not based on document paradigm but on module paradigm. authors no more create documents they create topics which represent some artifact of the system they describe.

problem for an information architect

since i started working with DITA i reviewed several data models from coworkers, from customers and last but not least created by myself. All of them claimed to be DITA compliant.
Using them with also DITA complaint tools often fails for certain features or in some cases completely.

reason

the created models wasn't valid according to the released specification
creating a complaint DITA model (DTD or W3C Schema) requires to know all rules and requirements the DITA specification provides without having any tool support goes beyond the support of creating regular DTD's and W3C Schema's. this means the information architect is leaving alone with the underlying complexity.

i do not know exactly but based on data models i'm faced with i expect that at least 50% of customized DITA models out there are not complaint to the DITA spec.

few years ago i already posted this here: http://dita.xml.org/how-verify-certain-datamodel-dita-complaint
the used tools requires additional, tools specific configuration or semantic or simple doesn't implement a feature according to the specification

the second reason is getting better over time and today you find a bunch of tools which are production ready even for enterprise usage.

the first reason still not resolved.

you might argue, why not use the DITA model out of the box?

if you have specific requirements in your business process and you require additional semantic to support those
if you have to simplify the usage of content creation for the authors and users to get better and more consistent content outcome.
note: i consider DITA subsetting / configuration as just another way for the generic concept specialization
if you introduce new business domain / taxonomy into your content maintenance strategy.

issues if your model doesn't really confirms to the specification?

interoperability is no more guaranteed
this is mainly a problem for the enterprise and in most cases not at the beginning of the usage of DITA
but if you once look into this problem you forced to fix all content created against your model or adopt the processing chain your content is delivered to
process chain does not work
you add new tools to your environment and certain features doesn't work. you again can fix all your existing content and the data model and tools or adopt the tool with certain workarounds

this week i stumbled over DITAworks modeling module which is the first tool I'm aware of addresses the modeling use-case in the DITA domain.

I'm not yet verified it to see to until which extend this tool supports the modeling / validation process and how much manual work is still involved and how complete the implementation currently is. because this tool is still beta and is brand new i expect much outstanding work but i hope this tool opens the door for speed up DITA related development work and the more important part of the story improve quality for DITA related information models.

i know that the amount of money / amount of customer can be found in this domain is pretty small and the complexity of the problem isn't small enough therefore i do not expect too much competitors in near future, but i might be wrong.

time will show....

cloud toys

2009-04-01T20:58:00.004+02:00

essence of this blog created using http://www.wordle.net/

Correlation

2009-04-01T17:43:00.000+02:00

lets see: http://xkcd.com/552/

content & service composition: small and simple showcase

2009-03-31T21:49:00.005+02:00

if you want to see and learn how easy a information aggregation use case incl. corresponding presentation can be solved take a look at "Make dashboards with XQuery".

this sample is all about composition, from content and service (functional) point of view.

most of the concepts required in the file of information processing are involved. even if the implementation has drawbacks and limitation in several points you see how information centric requirements can be solved.

distributed ping

2009-03-30T00:12:00.001+02:00

just ping....your server infrastructure.

just another standard to manage content

2009-03-29T21:48:00.006+02:00

CMIS is another try to provide a vendor independent content exchange api. major ECM vendors, like MS, Oracle, IBM and many others are joined the corresponding OASIS TC to release the first version of this new standard.

good overview of the current state can be found in "CMIS meeting notes".

I'd like the idea to have a common accepted and wide adopted standard to maintain resources and all related concepts.

major advantages

decoupling of client implementation dealing with standard related concepts from server implementation
=>decoupling
usage of several server implementations through single client implementation
=>integration
adaption of common and rich infrastructure for specific needs
=>enrichment

this leads to the core vision i have in mind talking about such a standard.

Vision

core infrastructure of a content management is provided by regular OS client infrastructure and specific needs are implemented on top of those core layer. a wide range of server side infrastructure can be used and integrated without adding IT complexity.

WebDAV

we already heard about those vision, thats what WebDAV claim to provide....
why not working stronger on WebDAV instead of re-inventing the wheel? looking at the world of WebDAV shows the issues in this area:

many incomplete implementation out there
integration in regular OS infrastructure is half-assed and error prone
WebDAV is implemented as an additional API with limited maturity and attention of CMS vendors.
DeltaV extension only supported by a very rare and not widely used implementations
....

of course, WebDAV standard is still not feature complete. especially search interface and concept of typed links are not yet provided by the WebDAV standard. but adding this as additional extension is not a big deal (see also http://www.webdav.org/specs/rfc5323.html).

the major issue with WebDAV is simple the lack of robust and complete implementation. the main reason: it is easier to define a standard than fully implement those standard and resolve existing issues within the standard.

the major members in CMIS TC are the same as those working on WebDAV standard. i personal hope that the success and sustainability of implementation will be improved. otherwise there is just another standard no one takes care of once it is 80% complete.

i do not compare both approaches because this is another story but in terms of simplicity WebDAV is currently in pole position. more to come......

Windows Unlimited?

2009-03-27T22:18:00.004+01:00

i often have to deal with application server design and deployments based on 32bit Windows server OS.

if you have to maintain more than one application server on a single host and for some reasons have to have more virtual address space for one application server you have to deal with /3GB switch enterprise server OS provides.

the expected load -> request to each running application server -> amount of threads on each application server must be defined carefully and requires more OS in depth know than I'm willing to have.

you have to understanding how the OS deals with system resources and in this context i stumbled over a good blog post

Pushing the Limits of Windows: Paged and Nonpaged Pool

which describe the limits of Windows pretty clear and understandable even for guys like me ;-)

not often read such comprehensive and focused information for this particular topic. thanks Mark for that.....

open usage of sequence of data points

2009-03-18T21:34:00.002+01:00

lot of important data out there are simple "Time series" data, means a sequence of one or more data points change over time.

a service to share and use such data is Timetric. currently the amount of user and useful time series are small but in general such pretty platform can deploy common time series from many different domains.

problem

who takes care that the shared data is correct and therefore is valuable to use? all services based on public contribution and usage are faced with the same issue. do you trust the data you see? do you trust wikipedia? in general you should not. you have to double check at least 2 different sources before you use the provided data.

in addition once you double checked your data you have to make sure that the quality of data is guaranteed over time. that is much more difficult.

solution?

if the data is mission critical you should not use data before validating them. in case of non static data you have to validate the data each time they change. this means that you either need more than one data source as service which are not based on same data source or you have to look and buy commercial services takes care of the provided data or you request the service from the organization owns / collecting the data. each of those solution requires special handling for the particular domain.

summary

availability of public data service are promising but i currently do not see a available model to trust in. therefore usage is pretty limited only for some kind of "outline view"

data processing workflows

2009-03-15T22:35:00.004+01:00

if you are faced with data processing workflow which requires to process / transform a huge amount of data in a limited amount of time this can end up in pretty complex implementations. if you have enough hardware to do the job you need a infrastructure makes use of the hardware.

using hardware for a limited time today isn't a big issue. the cloud infrastructure out there (e.g Amazon ec2) is perfect if you have to process a huge amount of data in limited amount of time for a limited duration. you are able to scale the usage of the required hardware for the time they are required and just pay for the required duration.

now you also need a ready to use software infrastructure to implement the processing workflow. MapReduce is a software infrastructure for such kind of problems.

Apache hadoop implement this MapReduce but it lacks of easy of use means is a pretty low level infrastructure and of course lacks of higher level workflows which is not defined by MapReduce.

Cascading closes the gap. based on "stream processing" the MapReduce pattern are applied and used. it is not too complicated within one day i was able to create a simple applicaton which convert 20 TB of svg data to jpg and doing some transformation in between using batik and 20 concurrent hardware nodes.

for some use cases the power of cloud is easy to tell....

eat your own dog food

2009-03-15T22:11:00.002+01:00

if you in a position to hire a consultant you would ask which one to choose? in each business domain the amount of consultant are huge in each domain.

two things you should consider (after looking into the slides they present):

don't hire someone who leaves before the suggestions are implemented. so each project tries to involve external consults should make sure that the involved people are not only responsible to provide some kind of "best practices" but also to implement their usage in the particular case they are hired
don't hire someone who do not eat his own dog food. means ask you're potential consultant how comparable cases are solved by his own company or his or her own daily business.
each problem can be traced down to some analogue problem which requires the same approaches you faced with. if you talk about the daily work and solution with your consultant before hire him you get a good feeling if the external person really knows what he talking about

its often not the slides which are important its more often the individual experience and knowledge make the difference between good and excellence help in you particular problem domain.

link: Download Free Office 2007 Software from Microsoft

2009-03-02T00:20:00.001+01:00

good summary of MS Office 2007 add-ons available for free can be found here:

http://bhandler.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!70F64BC910C9F7F3!1822.entry

Information Dynamics

2009-03-01T23:52:00.002+01:00

i stumbled over a dissertation which focus on "Information, Their Effects and Management in Supply Chains". unfortunately the paper is only available in German. quotation from the summary:

I therefore suggest focusing SCM initiatives on information processing and information efficiency in order to enhance overall system behaviour and efficiency.

take the time and read the paper, it provides a interesting view on effect and impact of information in SCM.

ODF and OOXML: interoperability issues

2009-03-01T22:33:00.004+01:00

as already mentioned here using a standard does not guarantee to be vendor / implementation independent.

the following paper "Lost in Translation: Interoperability Issues for Open Standards -- ODF and OOXML as Examples" shows that complexity is one major show stopper in this area.

why?

OOXML and ODF try to define office documents this means that content, content structure and layout (and application semantic) must be standardized.

because the complexity of both standards is high only limited amount of vendors are able to implement 100% coverage of the standard and even if they try they are not able to prevent errors in implementation.

lessons learned?

standards should carefully consider good old "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." (see http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein) principle. in our context this means that those standards require certain, atomic level of conformance which makes it possible for each vendor to implement a certain and complete subset if the complete set is not possible and useful for a particular application.

IT centric projects likely to fail

2009-02-22T21:17:00.005+01:00

during the last two years many projects around trends like "social networking" / Web 2.0 comes to IT departments. the IT guys reading stories from well known vendors like Microsoft that collaboration and information sharing is one of the most important trends for next years.

they take this input and run to their sponsors (business departments) and ask them if they have trouble maintaining information around in their daily business and surprise, surprise they received a "yes we have problems".

why?

most of todays problems are caused by incufficient information lifecycle. the core buisness assets are more or less maintained by information supporting and guiding the core buisness assets are still not really under control. project teams are not able to share a common view of project / work related information, information get lost from one human interfact to the next. supporting documents are not findable even if they exist somewhere.....

IT trys to fix this

they hire few consultants train them installing the product of interests providing wiki, blog, chat, document managment functionality. if they are smart enough they ask the buisness department for their requirements and now they try to setup a pilot using their product of choice.

great everything works after few days of development.....business departments start to use the good new world....solution gets adapted and released.....

one year later looking back and surprise, surprise the problems still the same just in another layout.

this story happens several times during the last year. Look at the most MS Sharepoint related projects out their -- most of them a great experience for the IT / consultants and developers but few or zero benefit for the business.

why?

its simple and everybody knows the answer. IT systems doesn't solve a problem and on the other hand are not the cause of the problem. the problem is caused and must be solved within the business process itself. IT systems can only provide sufficient support for certain steps in the process if the process and connected process itself is healthy.

example

if business people claim they always faced with outdated information the cause is manifold. there might be no process to update the corresponding information at a certain step in the process. there might be no time to update the known information source, there might be no information which are the relevant information source for other people in the team, there might be redundant information source and the wrong one is used.......

sounds trivial and obvious but....
why we still faced with IT centric projects?

IT people are happy to develop new solutions
+
business people are happy to find someone guilty for existing problems.
+
IT people don't like to identify the real cause they are mainly focus on the solution.
+
business people cannot image what a certain IT solution mean for their daily business.
+
IT people don't understand the CAUSE they only understand the PROBLEM itself (expressed in "requirements")

and therefore both parties believe they solve a existing problem but they simple implement a solution to decant the problem into another IT solution.

summary

never try to solve a existing problem related to information management never introduce a IT solution first. enforce the business to solve and describe their problems using the existing tool chain and try to identify the CAUSE of the problem. if this is done and works successful the areas a IT solution can support is easy to identify and now its much easier to identify which IT solutions is the right one to choose....

p.s.

i don't say that the mentioned product MS Sharepoint is good or bad but it is a product IT tend to play with and therefore a good example many working people faced with....

classified as INTJ

2009-02-21T20:31:00.002+01:00

stumbled over Typelyzer which tries to define Myers Briggs Type Indicator. i immediate tried it out using my own blog http://trent-intovalue.blogspot.com/

viola: this blog is classified as INTJ

does this fit? well, it at least fits to the content of my blog.

how does it work?

they using free http://www.uclassify.com/ engine for text classification based on content similarity. they trained their classification with many reference material created by persons known and classified as one of the different types.

to identify psychological preferences based on blog entries is another great experiment to use available information and draw conclusions.

maps in svg

2009-02-16T20:53:00.005+01:00

if you search for maps in svg you can have a look at blank maps from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Blank_maps

svg is pretty smart if you require automatic creation of dynamic content like charts and visual reports based on dynamic data.

by the way svg standard has still many limitation in terms of interoperability and tool support. but in case svg cannot be published as-is Apache Batik is there to transform the svg source into format you require (pdf, eps, png, tif).

RDF support using yahoo's BOSS

2009-02-15T23:44:00.003+01:00

yahoo added rdf/microformat support to their public search api called BOSS.
to understand how it works read http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/structureddata.html

this makes semantic sources if available usable in searches and therefore BOSS might be one real alternative to what the bg (big google) provides......

change is todays baseline

2009-02-15T23:22:00.002+01:00

stumbled over the following short video sequence which shows the pace of change

http://www.youtube.com/v/jpEnFwiqdx8&rel=1&fs=1&showsearch=0

hold on and pay attention. thanks to
http://leadonpurposeblog.com/2008/11/25/the-pace-of-change/ 

for pointing me to this link.

open source search engine: apache lucense & solr

2009-02-15T20:39:00.004+01:00

Apache Lucene is one of the most interesting search api's in open source marketplace. it provides a powerful and pluggable interface to provide full test feature set to many java based application.
but Lucene is "only" an api not an application.

Apache Solr is on the other hand is an enterprise search server based on Apache Lucene. the feature set behind that solution is worth to look at, means Solr introducing features some commercial systems still missing. for example using standard enterprise search provided by MS within their Sharepoint product you wonder how less features are available there.....(maybe adding FAST into next generation of Sharepoint change that but thats another story),

since few month professional services for the mentioned open source products can be used from Lucid Imagination. providing support and integration work for open source products makes the usage for the products more useful for the enterprise.

if you have to provide advance "full text" feature double check the open source community before you invest in commercial variations....

Generate DITA Java API reference documentation using DITADoclet and DITA API specialization

2009-02-08T23:03:00.003+01:00

one example to show a step to close the gap between developers who creating the artifacts and outgoing and enriched documentation created from their source without the need of additional redundancy.
it is not too far away from approach introduced by javadoc / doxygen beside the datamodel used behind this approach has much more value for additional information integration as provided by the classical approach.

not all yet done by the "out-of-the box" solution provided here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-DITAdoclet/
but you can imagine the possibilities using this kind of approach:

integration of additional information provided by marketing or tech-doc groups or service groups without any media break in information usage
usage of other deployment processes for api documentation available within companies infrastructure
.....

improve your full text search experience

2009-02-08T20:54:00.003+01:00

Cloudlet a free firefox extension improves your google search experience and provide "cloud" based access to additional keywords might help your to access the relevant information faster. there is no magic behind that (and the results are not perfect in all cases) just using the information provided by google itself.....full text search as its best.

link: Project Euler

2009-02-08T18:43:00.002+01:00

this project

Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.

The motivation for starting Project Euler, and its continuation, is to provide a platform for the inquiring mind to delve into unfamiliar areas and learn new concepts in a fun and recreational context.
http://projecteuler.net/

is out there for a while but i just stumbled over it. check it out.....

Rocks Into Gold - Helping Programmers THRIVE through the Credit Crunch

2009-01-25T20:39:00.002+01:00

summary of "Rock Into Gold" from Clarke Ching can be downloaded at http://silkandspinach.net/2009/01/18/rocks-into-gold/.

just read.....

Pipelines and SOA -> pipelines are more than that

2009-01-25T17:51:00.004+01:00

new book "Software Pipelines and SOA" showing the advantages using "software pipeline" approach from very technical and partial point of view.

the pattern itself has much more benefit and performance scalability is only the one of them (and in many cases not the most important one). the principle to process a flow of information in atomic, semantically closed steps is a pattern which unix itself was build on.
if you ever seen how easy even complex processes can be created based on pretty simple and atomic executables you can imagine what pipelining mean in terms of software architecture (see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_(Unix))

unix (and nowadays many other similar infrastructures) use a abstract stream of data passed through the pipeline and therefore the flow of information is less semantic, is is only a abstract stream of data. the usage of pipelines can be improved if more common semantic is part of the overall pipeline, means each step / operation has more information of what is expected to flow through than just data.

XML pipelining is intent to use XML as information flow. this ensures that data processing / transformation can be done using less basic byte stream operation. processing can be done on declarative languages like xpath, xquery, xslt, .... which again reduce the complexity of information access and transformation.

xml itself can express endless amount of user data using different data models. a pipeline defined for a subset of data models can again reduce the complexity and therefore can improve the benefit of a particular pipeline infrastructure.
you can imagine pipelines dedicated to transform content created against a DITA data model into endless of distribution formats. the semantic of a particular pipeline step can be used in several pipes are much higher than on "general purpose XML" level.

if we're looking into the second term "SOA" within the mentioned book title we have to divide:

pipelining to orchestrate dedicated services (macro pipelining)
because each business process can be expressed using the pipeline paradigm the implementation of SOA orchestration is suggested to do using the pipeline pattern.

therefore you have to define the sequence / control flow of services and corresponding message transformation.
languages like BPEL providing a model to express such kind of pipelines.

this layer often require persistence of pipeline state because execution of such processes can take between hours and years.
this layer often requires human steps, means not the complete pipeline can be executed by a machine without human interaction. languages like BPEL4People are extension to cover this standard requirement.

there are many frameworks out there trying to provide an easy to start infrastructure. by the way the usage and complexity of current implementation must be still not underestimated.
pipelining to solve one or more dedicated business steps (micro pipelining)
within each business process a given amount of data confirms to specification A must be transformed into data confirms to specification B.
e.g. extracting order data from ERP system and add sum for particular product groups before the result must be render to HTML for later display to the person in charge.

those operation can of course as well defined as sequence of steps in which the input data is transformed into output data using multiple steps. those definition mainly derived from business rules.

this layer does not require human interaction and persistence and therefore can be implemented on fully automated frameworks. using XML as data backbone results in "xml pipelining which combines most advantages required for "micro pipelining"

languages like xproc, xpl , .... and corresponding implementation can be used in this area.

in general a micro pipeline transform one input of a macro pipeline step into corresponding output(s)

summary

pipelining is one of the most powerful paradigm we faced with for todays common IT problems. but this pattern is either new not magic its more a "back to the roots....".

Webinar: Building RESTful Services with XQuery and XRX

2009-01-25T17:28:00.002+01:00

O'Reilly Webinar "Building RESTful Services with XQuery and XRX" happens on 28.01.09 (10:00 a.m. PST).
if you want to know how the mentioned technologies can work together.....

SOA Patterns

2009-01-18T22:28:00.001+01:00

site to share / read / contribute SOA design pattern. whenever you are involved in SOA implementation projects is worth to take a short look into:

http://soapatterns.org/

read if you require a SOA headline summary

2009-01-15T22:51:00.002+01:00

enforced by "SOA is Dead" thread, the following post is a good summary of what SOA is and what not.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Zapthink/~3/512932246/report.html

RIA for information deployment

2009-01-14T21:42:00.008+01:00

during the last couple of years the requirements to (software) applications changing in many ways:

from application to solution
=> customer is able to configure a solution based on provided services and corresponding orchestration and configuration
from static deployment to dynamic deployment
=>customer is able to update a bought component via online connection. new solution feature can be added, configuration can be changed based on demand.
from function oriented usage to process oriented usage
=>the application functions are embedded in business tasks reflecting the business process of different user group. different user groups therefore faced with different application behavior.

not all of the mentioned "trends" are incooperated in each application today but more and more companies providing a subset of the mentioned approaches in their products / solutions. if products changed to solution can be adopted to achieve most value for one particular customer or customer domain the corresponding information (online help, user documentation, service information, faq, ....) must follow this approach as well.

this in particular means that the information must designed to provide

size on demand
each information product can be configured to fit one particular product installation. product configuration can change over time
update on demand
information updates can be provided as fast as possible using "online channels". on the other hand content must be available without any "online channel" available.
workflow related content mapping
information must not only map to a particular function of the product as already done with e.g. context sensitive onine helps. the information must be mapped and aligned with the workflow / buisness process the production customer intent to use the product

if you faced with such productions and you have to contribute any kind of information you know that this those change the way you have to create / maintain and deploy corresponding information products.

if we look into the information deployment process (other part of information lifecycle is part of subsequent blog posts) one of the most interesting answers to this question is the usage of RIA frameworks for that purpose.

most promising application looking at information deployment is "Adobe AIR".
why:

most of the required features are part of the design focus or already implemented
Adobe has selected information products in mind (using RoboHelp for creating online help for Air).
DITA user community start development of a corresponding plugin to create Adobe AIR help from content created using DITA architecture. (see http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/dita-users/message/12821

that more the other RIA application can provided today but that does not mean that they do provide the possibility to be a deployment platform for information products in the future (e.g. "Google Gears" has similar goals to Adobe AIR)

next step would be to define a gap analysis which features is missing in Adobe AIR and which buisness goal is therefore not fulfilled based on current available platform. i will do this during the next few weeks...see what the results are.

just using xml provides Interoperability?

2009-01-13T00:19:00.005+01:00

"The Anatomy of Interoperability" is one of the best articles summarize the issue of well know and often promised term "interoperability".

one domain often faced with this term is the world of xml and related "standards". lot's of them out there, some of them really stable and useful and even are interoperable (e.g. xml 1.0, xslt 1.0, xpath 1.0) itself.

by the way just using xml does not gurantee interoperablility for your data. this is only available if application behavior is addressed by a related standard. xml related standards try to achive this (e.g. svg) often fail or they are difficult to use because they missing essential features the specific user domain requires and corresponding tool vendors / application provides add them in a tool specific way. or the standard is too complex to implement a 100% complaint application (e.g. xlink).

DITA for example a new OASIS standard / information architecture to maintain mainly techdoc related features more and more faces with those issues. this standard has customization in mind, means specialization to specific needs is part of the design but there are of course still limitation and there a good reasons for those limitations in general.

the initial standard was not feature complete (means essential requirements were missed in user point of view) and therefore vendors /consultants / end user adding specific non complaint features for their specific needs which often results in missing the goal of interoperability.

why is DITA still successful?

to understand this you have two things to consider:

keep in mind that just using xml does not solve your interoperability goals without any additional effort
keep in mind that fully inoperable data is not always what you need. regular business cases often working well with a inoperable subset or predefined transformation on demand.

what makes xml worse to look at is the ability to access / transform the tagged data without requiring a vendor specific api (but often you need vendor specific know how to understand the application semantic) and a foreseeable effort to do this.

and that is the key feature if you think about organization specific information models.

additional semantic for existing information sources

2009-01-11T21:19:00.004+01:00

how information enrichment works in real world showing two public use-cases based on different technologies:

freebase
"Freebase is an open, shared database that contains structured information on millions of topics in hundreds of categories. This information is compiled from open datasets like Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the CIA World Fact Book, as well as contributions from our user community."

this means that applications like freebase using already existing information and trying to add additional semantic to them based on combining and extracting information and context or in this case let user add additional semantics without modification to the source of the information.

the tool thinkbase using freebase to provide a visual graph of information and corresponding link dependencies.
MailMark using a xml database (Mark Logic) as backbone for building the application just on XQuery

the semantic comes from information aggregation and combination. in this application no additional user interaction is possible

both examples are very useful and showing real world application which you might transform into your own information landscape.....

XBRL: a language for the electronic communication of business and financial data

2009-01-11T19:57:00.003+01:00

good overview can be found here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-think43/

XRX gets more attention

2009-01-10T22:50:00.003+01:00

XRX shows that more and more information are represented in xml today. that trend will continue because more and more processes today seen as what they always was: "information driven". more and more traditional "unstructured" formats are now represented in xml and more and more business value can be extracted from those formats (OOXML, Open Document, ....).

on the other hand more and more companies start to creating certain type of information (user documentation, online helps, service information) using more semantic rich information architecture as provided by dita.

that opens up the success for databases with native xml read / maintain and search feature set. they are able to provided additional value to already existing information created without the knowledge of their future use.

good summery of technologies in this area are provided by Kurt Cagle

"Analysis 2009: XForms and XML-enabled clients gain traction with XQuery databases"

Wiki: solves collaboration & information sharing?

2009-01-10T21:11:00.005+01:00

i often hear statements that using a wiki platform will solve our company problem in collaboration and information sharing.
based on my personal experience most of the wiki project's seen in reality failing silent, means they start with more or less enthusiasm but end up in either

content silos with outdated, bad findable information chunks
or
unused part of the companies intranet / IT infrastructure
or
derived by only a handful contributers and users

recently published article http://www.cmswatch.com/Feature/190-Wiki-Myths?source=RSS showing the reason and rational for that behavior.

by the way there are wiki projects out there (internet -> wikipedia, intranet) which are successful.

what makes them successful?

in my personal point of view, each successful "information process" requires at least

definition of common information lifecycle
- who has to create which kind of information?
- which criteries must be fulfilled to define a information object as usable?
- which kind of subject matter expert must a involved for which kind of information
....
and common information taxonomie
- what kind of information must be maintained
- what kind of common classification do we use
- best practices for structuring the information
....
and people who create, maintain and use the information
- training is required
- advantages and usage of information must be part of common understanding => people must see personal benefit in using and maintaining the information
....

based on spirit and purpose of the wiki within an organisation those guidelines must be more or less detailed but in any extend they must be available and somehow trained / reviewed.

the most successfull wiki project Wikipedia provides the mentioned guidlines all in an open and collaborative way (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About#Contributing_to_Wikipedia)

one thing does not work is to setup a wiki platform and post a link to all potential users without any additional hard work.

always remember: providing information not more but not less than hard work. the more value a information must provide the more hard work is required to create them.

directory of services in the cloud

2009-01-06T21:20:00.003+01:00

directory of available API's in the cloud are available here:

http://www.programmableweb.com/apis/directory

the list shows two things

there are lot of services out there many of them can be used free of charge

but
the stability of usage is a huge problem
- few listed services are moved or removed completely
- few service definition often changed without providing a sufficient version management

Buzzwording continues?

2009-01-06T20:20:00.005+01:00

the IT industry is very innovative in creating and consuming buzzwords. from year to year at least one new trend alongside with one or more buzzwords are created.

main reason for that success is the corresponding visibility and based on that the opportunity to get budget. the main characteristic of such terms is that there are no formal definition of what is really the essence / definition of such term but on the other hand everybody seems to have a clear and complete understanding and definition for the term / buzzword.

second characteristic of such terms is that a common trend is associated with those terms.

and last but not least the life cycle of such trends are pretty similar, approx. 1/2 year until everybody is aware of it (through publications, blog posts, articles), 1 year highest awareness incl. associated investments and at the end the trend will be replaced by next one.

that looks pretty similar to fashion industry and in my point of view there is not too much structural differences between a new fashion trend and a IT trend.

just a small list of buzzwords from the last few years:

why is it possible to make money with those trends? because all of them promising to solve real existing problems in real industry. if we use the trends mentioned above their main focus is to

consistent access to required information at the right time at the right place
get rid of increasing IT complexity
get rid of proprietary vendor driven information silos
reduce Total cost of ownership for hosting the available information within a company
improve collaboration between different business groups
improve adaptability to changing business requirements
....

if we take the essence of the mentioned buzzwords and collect them again than the following is really promising

usage of dedicated and well defined services for business automation
pay for usage of a defined service level instead of paying for hardware / software and corresponding maintenance (what really cares is the service that automates a certain business step)
architecture that adapts fast and controlled to change of business requirements (changed SLA) and not to changed IT requirements
.....

the trends above of course drives the creation of standards, software and services makes those requirements easier to fulfill but still it still hard work and more than just using those nice buzzwords.....

Ultimate List of Free Windows Software from Microsoft

2009-01-04T18:12:00.002+01:00

finding free and often useful utilities from MS is sometimes time consuming.

this list can help

http://bhandler.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!70F64BC910C9F7F3!1231.entry?wa=wsignin1.0

xml processing in TecDoc industry

2009-01-03T21:39:00.005+01:00

based on my previous talk on German tekom conference the main rational and corresponding issues behind xml / xml processing are defined here. to avoid translation of content i decided to post the content in German. slides are available here.

Warum sollte man sich im Umfeld der technischen Dokumentation mit Pipelinesprachen insbesondere mit XML basierten Pipelinesprachen beschäftigen?

Zwei Thesen zur Begründung

These 1 – Nutzen von Information

Der Nutzen von Informationseinheiten steigt mit der Anzahl der Prozesse, die auf diesen angewendet werden.

Erstellt und liefert ein Unternehmen Gebrauchsanweisungen in Papier für sich sehr stark unterscheidende Produktgruppen in nur einer Sprache, so sind die darin enthaltenen Informationen relativ einfach zu erstellen und verwalten aber der Nutzen der Information für das Unternehmen sehr gering. Die Bedeutung und der Wert der Information nimmt mit jedem zusätzlichen Nutzer der Information (zusätzliche Online Hilfe, Sprachvarianten, Produktvarianten, Nutzung der Information in Produktschnittstelle....) zu.

Zur Nutzenmaximierung muss somit die Anzahl der Verwender einer Information innerhalb der Anwendungsfallspezifischen Rahmenbedingungen maximiert werden. Jede Verwendung von Information basiert auf der Etablierung eines Prozesses zur Verwendung dieser(Erstellung eines Handlungsanleitenden Textes in deutsch, Wiederverwenden von dedizierten Informationsbausteinen einer Sprache, Erstellung einer Variante innerhalb eines bestehenden Informationsbausteines, Publikation einer Online Hilfe, ....). Da jeder Prozess die Komplexität des Gesamtprozesses erhöht steigt der Aufwand über den Gesamtprozess des Informationslebenszyklus mit jedem zusätzlichen Prozess, d.h. mit jeder zusätzlichen Verwendung der Information.

These 2 – Prozesse auf Informationen

Prozesse auf Informationseinheiten sind zum überwiegenden Teil innerhalb eines Unternehmens und sogar Unternehmensübergreifend identisch. Dies bedeutet im Umkehrschluss, das sich die Branche im Umfeld der technischen Dokumentation mit den Auswirkungen von „marginalen“ Unterschieden befasst. Die Unterschiede liegen im Wesentlichen in unterschiedlichen Informationsquellen (Art, Ablage, Format, ....) und den zu liefernden Informationsprodukten(Unternehmensspezifische Styleguides, zu liefernde Formate, ....).

Die Vielzahl von individuellen und spezifischen Prozessen ist weitgehend der fehlenden Zerlegung der Prozesse und der fehlenden übergreifenden Standardisierung von Prozessbestandteilen zuzuschreiben.

Die notwendigen Informationsbestandteile für jedes Kundendokument müssen anhand variabler Eingangsparameter identifiziert und bereitgestellt und schließlich zusammengebaut werden. Das Kundendokument wird mit angereichert, d.h. erhält einen oder mehrere Index mit definierten Anforderungen, ein Glossar, TOC, usw. Schlussendlich erfolgt eine Überführung nach HTML, PDF oder andere Formate. Eine weitere Zergliederung dieser Teilschritte führt für jeden dieser Schritte zu einem grossteil identischer und einer kleinen Anzahl spezifischer Schritte.

Schlüssel zum Erfolg

Um den Nutzen seiner Information nachhaltig zu maximieren muss dies mit einer konsequenten Zerlegung der Prozesse in ihre atomaren Bestandteile und somit der maximalen Nutzung vorhandener Prozessbestandteile (und das zugrunde liegende Wissen darüber) erfolgen. Somit kann der Aufwand und die Komplexität für die Nutzung von Informationseinheiten im Verhältnis zum Nutzen gering gehalten werden.

SMILA (SeMantic Information Logistics Architecture)

2009-01-03T21:06:00.000+01:00

"SMILA (SeMantic Information Logistics Architecture) is an extensible framework
for building search solutions to access unstructured information in the enterprise.
Besides providing essential infrastructure components and services, SMILA also delivers
ready-to-use add-on components, like connectors to most relevant data sources."

initiated by German based company empolis this project seems to be promising in solving one common problem while dealing with todays information overflow:

identification and access to information relevant for a given business task / process
integration of "unstructured" information in corresponding business process

used standards are of course complex and not really common used in many organizations right now but that might change in mid term....

Google testing blog

2007-04-30T12:27:00.000+02:00

The QA engineers behind the Google testing blog have been sharing their unit testing tips in an ongoing series titled "Testing on the Toilet":

We write flyers about everything from dependency injection to code coverage, and then regularly plaster the bathrooms all over Google with each episode, almost 500 stalls worldwide... We've decided to share this secret weapon with the rest of the world to help spread our passion for testing, and to provide a fun and easy way for you to educate yourself and the rest of your company about these important tricks and techniques.

james clark now blogging

2007-04-10T21:28:00.000+02:00

james clark is now blogging here: http://blog.jclark.com/

Time Ontology in OWL

2006-10-10T15:15:00.000+02:00

Time Ontology in OWL
Jerry R. Hobbs and Feng Pan, W3C Working Draft

Members of W3C's Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group have released the First Public Working Draft for "Time Ontology in OWL." The document presents an ontology of temporal concepts, OWL-Time (formerly DAML-Time), for describing the temporal content of Web pages and the temporal properties of Web services.
The ontology provides a vocabulary for expressing facts about topological relations
among instants and intervals, together with information about durations, and about datetime information. It also demonstrates in detail, using the Congo.com and Bravo Air examples from OWL-S, how this time ontology can be used to support OWL-S, including use cases for defining input parameters and (conditional) output parameters.

A use case for meeting scheduling is also shown. In the appendix we also describe a time zone resource in OWL we developed for not only the US but also the entire
world, including the time zone ontology, the US time zone instances,
and the world time zone instances.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-owl-time-20060927/
See also the W3C news item: http://www.w3.org/News/2006#item172

XML Pipelining for Mathematical Computation

2006-08-18T22:08:00.000+02:00

.....

XML Pipelining for Mathematical Computation
R. Alexander Milowski
Exposing a single computation on the Internet via a web service can be challenging. To do so, the input and output of such a service needs to be codified, typically in an XML Schema, and code needs to be written to translate to and from XML. Further, computations need to be interfaced and run with their results formulated into XML. To complicate matters further, there is the whole process of packaging such a system for deployment of some web services platform.

While many web services frameworks focus on the interfaces, what is at the core of exposing a web service is the processing of an XML vocabulary (the request elements). Each vocabulary is associated with a set of actions--implicitly or explicitly--to make a wanted computation to take place. Unfortunately, XML isn't always that simple to process and usually this involves writing a "pile of code". This forces the development of web services to be only in the domain of the expert programmer and not that of a Research Mathematician.....

great content....

SEDA

2006-08-14T19:54:00.000+02:00

stumbled upon
SEDA: An Architecture for Highly Concurrent Server Applications. at least the paper section contains must read content if you think about scalable application server infrastructure.

Technical Context and Cultural Consequences of XML

2006-06-11T11:50:00.000+02:00

very interessting article from "IBM Systems Journal (Volume 45, Number 2, 2006)" in the context of "Celebrating 10 Years of XML".

read: http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/452/adler.html

XProc / xml piplining / xml interop

2006-05-27T19:43:00.000+02:00

the main drawback of xml processing / "xml pipelining" is the lack of any standardisation in this area.

there are already lots of implementation out there (see http://norman.walsh.name/2005/10/27/xmlProcModel) but most of them are more or less spike solutions or vendor driven island.

in my point of view the most interessting approach is XPL (http://www.w3.org/Submission/2005/SUBM-xpl-20050411/). reference implementation is available within orbeon presentation server (www.orbeon.com). not worth to take a look at.....

i wonder what does slow down the process of standardisation? main reason is that this topic is somehow underestimated. as already mentioned it covers the missing piece of the puzzel xml interop.

there are many useful xml processing standards already available:

- xslt (http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL/)

- XQuery (http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery/)

- XUpdate (http://www.smb-tec.com/xmldb/xupdate/index.html)

- DOM (http://www.w3.org/DOM/)/ SAX (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_API_for_XML) and corresponding implementations in several programming languages

- WSDL (http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl)

- ....

but there is no standard describing the orchestra of these components. because each of those standards are functional components must be assambled to get a application.

thus leads to many different approaches to build up xml based applications, each of them are less more or less sufficient but non of them can be exchanged with each other or in other words non platform can extend an application developed based on a different platform.

xml pipelining can break down this limitation using same approach as unix pipes provides for bytes streams but on a higher level of abstraction (means xml provides more semantic than byte stream provides).

hopefully XProc succeed in terms of time and penetration....

alex

Process Management System

2006-05-16T22:20:00.000+02:00

today is stumble accross INTALIO and their Process Management System (bpms) through a post in Orbeon mailing list.

they relaunching their product suite as open source contribution which not worth to take a look into if you talking about buisness integration.

as assigned on their web side they implemented WS-BPEL 2.0 and BPEL4WS 1.1.

new platform (especially the open source edition) currently just announced but i'm very curious about the outcoming.....

alex

TRENT: definition

2006-05-15T22:43:00.000+02:00

what does TRENT reallly means. TRansform conTENT into value. nice marketing slang ..... but if you have to deal with information processing that is the main goal your are faced with.

content creation, content storage, content retrieval, content publishing but its all about the value the content provides to a particular actor.

content more general can be specified as an information object valid in a certain context. to be more concrete this means that a given word / information object "red" is only content if it is assigned as a property to a object "car" which specifies the context of this object.

to standardise content processing XML must be considered as a conceptional abstruction to describe and access information objects. XML provides a unique and reusable way how to process / access content.

therefore TRENT is all about XML processing or technology derived / extent XML processing technologies.

because information processing also means to orchestra more than one certain operation on the content you also have to think about an conceptional solution for assembly many dedicated processing calls to information objects.

thus problems can be addressed with well-known pipelining approach which in our case ends up in xml pipelining approach.

thus means

- TRENT is all about transformation of content

- transformation of content is all about pipelining

- content is all about XML

- TRENT is all about XML processing using xml pipelining

Alex