Linked Data

“Linked data” is about using the Web to connect related data that wasn’t previously linked or using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods. More specifically, Wikipedia defines linked data as “a term used to describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing and connecting pieces of data, information and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF.” Linked data lies at the heart of what Semantic Web is all about: large-scale integration of, and reasoning on, data on the Web. Â Linked data and the Semantic Web have always been of interest to IBM Research, but linked data has now become a central component of some of IBM’s product strategy. The Rational group in IBM has for several years been employing a read/write usage of linked data as an architectural style for integrating a suite of applications, and the company has shipped commercial products using this technology. The applications integrated in IBM products are primarily in the domains of application lifecycle management (ALM) and integration system management (ISM), but the company believes that using read/write linked data as an application integration technology could be broadly relevant and applicable within the IT industry. IBM is now working with W3C to formally define a linked data standard that will provide the industry with a standards framework that will benefit both small-scale in-browser applications (WebApps) and large-scale Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) efforts.

Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) is a community of software developers and organizations that is working to standardize the way that software lifecycle tools can share data—for example, requirements, defects, test cases, plans or code—with one another. Software and service providers that have adopted OSLC specifications can easily interoperate. However, the more participation and adoption from members of the industry, the greater the benefit is to the whole industry.

HTML5 is a markup language for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web, and is a core technology of the Internet originally proposed by Opera Software. It is the fifth revision of the HTML standard (created in 1990 and standardized as HTML4 as of 1997) and, as of June 2012, is still under development. Its core aims have been to improve the language with support for the latest multimedia while keeping it easily readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devices (Web browsers, parsers, etc.). IBM’s Diaz says HTML5 is one of the key technologies needed to enable and promote collaboration in the development and social environments.

OpenSocial is a public specification that defines a component hosting environment (container) and a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for Web-based applications. Initially, it was designed for social network applications and was developed by Google along with MySpace and a number of other social networks. In more recent times, it has become adopted as a general use runtime environment for allowing untrusted and partially trusted components from third parties to run in an existing Web application. The OpenSocial Foundation has also moved to integrate or support numerous other open Web technologies. This includes OAuth and OAuth 2.0, Activity Streams and portable contacts, among others. It was released Nov. 1, 2007.

OAuth is an open standard for authorization. It allows users to share their private resources—photos, videos, contact lists—stored on one Website with another site without having to hand out their credentials, typically supplying username and password tokens instead. Each token grants access to a specific site (for example, a video editing site), for specific resources (just videos from a specific album) and for a defined duration (the next two hours). This allows a user to grant a third-party site access to their information stored with another service provider, without sharing their access permissions or the full extent of their data. OAuth is a service that is complementary to, but distinct from, OpenID.

Activity Streams is an open-format specification for activity stream protocols, which are used to syndicate activities taken in social Web applications and services, similar to those in Facebook’s Newsfeed, FriendFeed and the Movable Type Action Streams plug-in, etc. Implementers of the Activity Streams draft include Facebook and MySpace as producers and Windows Live as a consumer.

In January 2012, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) international consortium launched a new open-standards initiative to enhance the portability of cloud applications and services. The OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) Technical Committee will advance an interoperability standard that will make it easier to deploy cloud applications without vendor lock-in, while maintaining application requirements for security, governance and compliance. TOSCA enables the interoperable description of application and infrastructure cloud services, the relationships between parts of the service, and the operational behavior of these services—deploy, patch, shutdown—independent of the supplier creating the service, and any particular cloud provider or hosting technology. TOSCA also makes it possible for higher-level operational behavior to be associated with cloud infrastructure management.

The Cloud Standards Customer Council is an end-user advocacy group dedicated to accelerating the cloud’s successful adoption and drilling down into the standards, security and interoperability issues surrounding the transition to the cloud. The council will provide cloud users with the opportunity to drive client requirements into standards development organizations and deliver materials such as best practices and use cases to assist other enterprises. The council will complement existing cloud standards efforts and establish a core set of client-driven requirements to ensure cloud users will have the same freedom of choice, flexibility and openness they have with traditional IT environments. The Cloud Standards Customer Council is open to all end-user organizations. The group will work to lower the barriers for widespread adoption of cloud computing by helping to prioritize key interoperability issues, such as cloud management, reference architecture, hybrid clouds, as well as security and compliance issues.

This group will focus on social business use cases and application of those use cases to standards, standards improvements and standards gaps. A social business capitalizes on new ways of connecting with people and content to transform how value is created and business gets done. The W3C community is made up of practitioners of social business who are intent on use case-driven guidance to the standards process in the social technology area. The mission of the Social Business Community Group is to gather practical, business-oriented, use cases focused on high-value transactions to influence and improve existing social standards in order to foster the growth and adoption of social standards in enterprise solutions. The group is focused on refining technologies that have occurred due to the “social” explosion on the Web—blogging , social networking, social media—so they can be successfully applied in business solutions. The group is comprised of enterprise practitioners as much as vendors in order to add a practical aspect to the work.

OpenStack is an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud computing project by Rackspace Cloud and NASA. Currently, more than 150 companies have joined the project, including AMD, Intel, Canonical, SUSE Linux, Red Hat, Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM and Yahoo. It is free, open-source software released under the terms of the Apache License. OpenStack integrates code from NASA’s Nebula platform as well as Rackspace’s Cloud Files platform. “OpenStack is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists that seek to produce a ubiquitous IaaS open-source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds,” according to Diaz’s published article. IBM’s initial focuses are to establish the OpenStack Foundation, support and expand the OpenStack ecosystem, and contribute to the OpenStack development.