OASIS melds sci-fi, SOA |
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By Michael Meehan, News Writer
02 Nov 2005 | SearchWebServices.com |
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There's an old sports adage that the future is now and OASIS seems to have bought into the concept, forming a technical committee designed to figure out how the next generation of computing will dovetail with service-oriented architecture.
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For the next decade, most of the value in SOA will be captured by making everything dumber instead of making everything smarter.
Miko Matsumura
Vice President of Marketing and Technology Standards, Infravio Inc.
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The OASIS Semantic Execution Environment Technical Committee will look to bring together developing movements like the Semantic Web and grid computing with SOA. The Semantic Web, designed to create a format where users and computers can hold free-flowing conversations, to date has been the pet project of World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee and housed within the W3C standards body.
The OASIS effort will look to take that work and apply it to specific business uses inside the context of SOA. How soon such things can yield practical business applications is anyone's guess, but the idea is to make users the functioning endpoints of a computing network.
You would no longer use a computer so much as you would plug yourself into a computing process.
"People always want to build the computer they see on Star Trek," said Miko Matsumura, vice president of marketing and technology standards at Infravio Inc.
The Semantic Web, like SOA, envisions a world beyond software where application integration gets replaced by a form of communication in which machines can share and process data no matter how it was designed or what its platform of origination is.
"Ultimately, it boils down to how you deliver a higher level of mission criticality," said Dana Gardner, analyst at Interarbor Solutions LLC. "As Web services go from limited projects and spotty deployments to something more pervasive, you can see where it will require a different method of processing the information."
Matsumura noted that Business Process Execution Language, much like the Semantic Web, has been an effort to bring the human element into a mapped-out computing process, but that the current workable method in all such models is to constrain the communication to specific definitions and specific tasks in order to avoid confusion. While that may limit the number of things you can say and the types of services a business can create, it is a practical and reliable approach, one Matsumura expects to see dominate the SOA market.
"For the next decade, most of the value in SOA will be captured by making everything dumber instead of making everything smarter," he said.
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