Understanding gov20 adoption, Developers / Technologists

Posted on June 22, 2010 by oliver

So, for the first in my series of none scientific posts about the state of gov20 deployment I thought I would pick up the easiest of the three segments that I mentioned yesterday and look at how developers and technologists are getting on.

I say the “easiest” simply because I think it is the clearest of the three segments in terms of adoption,  and is pretty consistent globally.

Whichever way you slice this audience it is clear that the opportunities presented by gov20 and open government have been embraced by developers, as a result almost everyday brings new data, new applications and new ideas.

dev and tech

That said, I think about three distinct threads of gov20 that relate directly to developers and technologists.

  1. Open Government Data – this is obviously beyond the innovator and early adopter stages, governments around the world have published complex datasets to government owned sites, delivering both transparency and opportunity.
  2. Application Development – much like the data, there are endless examples of great applications that have come out of the gov20 work that has taken place around the world. Almost everyday there are examples in my inbox of a new application or idea that will shortly be turned into one.
  3. Social Media –  My feeling is that the adoption of social media in a gov20 context sits in a slightly earlier stage of the curve. While an increasing number of our politicians are seeing the value of social media and are finding ways to make it work for them, there are still many more who have yet to explore tools like Facebook or Twitter.

It is no secret that the availability of government data and the ability to write applications are linked, with government providing the data and a combination of developers (public and private) then going ahead and using that data to write new and innovative tools.

It will be interesting to see what happens as the data related work moves towards the peek of the technology adoption curve. My expectation is that governments will begin to find ways to harmonize their published data, either at a semantic level or by working more closely together on data modelling. This will provide a platform where governments can do an increasing amount of cross jurisdictional analysis as they develop policy, and at this point we will see the applications that are being developed for mobile and web platforms today start to be complemented by the use of government data in enterprise customer and management tools that span both the public sector and the commercial worlds.

Social media as a mechanism of communication, for me at least, sits on its own. My feeling is that there is more work to be done if social media is to make it into the main stream, with many government users of social media today being people that I would put in the Innovator or Early Adopter category.

Social Media will find its role once citizens see it as a credible way to debate and discuss issues with their elected representatives and other senior members of government. There are elected representatives in ANZ who are actively demonstrating that this model can work, Senator Kate Lundy from Australia or Clare Curran, MP from New Zealand spring to mind. I suspect many of their colleagues are watching their work closely and they will become a guide for what happens next in this space.

As with all of my posts this week (or at any time for that matter) you may see things differently.

Commentary welcome.

Posted in eGovernment | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Understanding gov20 adoption, finding a model

Posted on June 21, 2010 by oliver

The day I started my first technology marketing job my hiring manager presented me with a book about the technology adoption lifecycle. It is a phenomenally useful way of looking at the market adoption of a new product or technology, offering plenty of clear pointers around how you should be managing both your marketing plans and the lifecycle of your product.

Over the years the technology adoption lifecycle has been used in many books and other studies, you could be familiar with Everett Roger’s Diffusion of Innovations, or Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm.

I plucked the image below from Wikipedia, I’m not sure I entirely subscribe to the percentages on this particular graph, but you get the picture.

Earlier today I found myself wondering how this thinking could be applied to the current state of gov20 adoption and deployment, and what it might teach us as we try and work out where the conversation needs to go next.

The goal of any marketer working with this model is to work out what materials or other evidence you need to produce to attract Innovators who will come and play with your product, then successively how you will produce the next set of materials that you need to move your position in the market to the next segment of the curve, picking up an increasing customer base as you go. As you pass over the peek of the curve you might also start to think about what you need to do to start the cycle again with a new product or technology and what this might mean to existing customers of your product.

For the model to work you need to think about a combination of the overall market and how you would break it down into addressable segments that you can apply understanding and action to.

For gov20 I came up with the following segments, your mileage may vary;

  • Citizens / Consumers – consumers of services, people who vote, tourists visiting from overseas etc.
  • Politicians / Civil Servants –creators of services, people who define policy, people managing budgets in government etc.
  • Developers / Technologists  – developers inside and outside of government building online services, departments publishing opendata, consumers of published opendata etc.

As the date for NZ OpenGov 2010 gets closer I thought I might publish a series of posts, one on each of these segments. Each post will talk a little about my own perception of how I think we are getting on and some ideas around what we might be able to collectively do next.  I have no empirical evidence to present, but figured this might be a good way of opening the conversation.

More tomorrow…

Posted in eGovernment | Tagged , | 5 Comments

CSIRO Megatrends and Megashocks

Posted on June 21, 2010 by oliver

One more that I missed when it was published earlier this year.

Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) have published a report outlining what they call their megatrends and megashocks titled “Our Future World: An analysis of global trends, shocks and scenarios”.

The five megatrends they identify in the report are;

  1. More from less. This relates to the world’s depleting natural resources and increasing demand for those resources through economic and population growth. Coming decades will see a focus on resource use efficiency. 
  2. A personal touch. Growth of the services sector of western economies is being followed by a second wave of innovation aimed at tailoring and targeting services. 
  3. Divergent demographics. The populations of OECD countries are ageing and experiencing lifestyle and diet related health problems. At the same time there are high fertility rates and problems of not enough food for millions in poor countries.
  4. On the move. People are changing jobs and careers more often, moving house more often, commuting further to work and travelling around the world more often. 
  5. i World. Everything in the natural world will have a digital counterpart. Computing power and memory storage are improving rapidly. Many more devices are getting connected to the internet.

The trends themselves are not too much of a shock, however the data and supporting information that the document uses to support each one of them makes for a fascinating read. If you have some time to spare I would highly recommend taking a look.

Posted in General | Tagged | 1 Comment

Information is currency

Posted on March 23, 2010 by oliver

Coins and plant, isolated on white background For centuries economies have been based upon a well proven model of bartering, early trading involved individuals exchanging goods or services of similar value then over time we saw cash become the primary means of applying a value to a transaction. Over the last decade we have seen several companies and individuals work out the next step in the evolution of currency, applying value to information in ways that we never previously imagined.

As a society we have always understood the value of big pieces of information. Every day corporate moguls exchange it for power, spies have used it to bring down ancient kings, and criminals have occasionally been able to turn it into money by blackmailing a cheating spouse. However, at the lower end of the scale we’re probably just starting to understand the value of the information that we hold.

Over the last decade, as information based business models have evolved, we have seen a number of companies work out how they can translate information into revenue, in many cases turning that information into cash through the use of targeted advertising engines. These companies are able to take information from many sources, then process it to ensure that advertisers can target their adverts directly to the right individual or set of individuals.

Supported by advanced computing power, this new breed of company has been able to achieve two things. First of all the ability to process massive amounts of seemingly irrelevant information, enabling them to build complex demographic models that provide them with a deep understanding of societies behaviours and secondly manage and collect micropayments in exchange for the information that they have processed. In today’s environment information no longer needs to be big enough to bring down a king to be valuable, you can build a multi billion dollar business based upon information that sells many millions of times over for a single cent a time.

Who does this information really belong to though? Is information about what we eat and drink, where we visit, how healthy we are and what we like to do in our spare time something that should be public domain or should it be private information that belongs to each of us personally?

Today’s model is pretty straight forwards. Many of the companies that collect and process information about us provide us with valuable services in return. Instead of spending traditional cash for access to these services we are in essence (and sometimes unwittingly) investing our personal information in return for email, blogging tools and other similar services.

For those who choose not to use a particular companies services there is probably an unrealized loss, assuming that they own their information then they’re still investing the same information but as they are not using services their information is turned into cash through an advertising model which then goes straight to the companies bottom line profits.

In the future I would expect that we will see more evolution of this information to advertising model. Individuals are already beginning to recognize that their information has value, for the moment all you can do at that point is hide what information you can behind privacy permissions that are granted to you, in the future I think we will be able to do to more.

Assuming that the title of this post is fact then I expect we will eventually see mathematical models that help us understand the floating exchange rate between, for example, a home address and the New Zealand Dollar (which might be as low as a couple of cents), or the rate between the mapping of an individuals DNA and the British Pound (which would most likely be into the thousands of Pounds).

In essence information as a currency will be able to float in value alongside the rest of the existing currencies of the world. At that point individuals will be able make similar decisions with their information that they make with money today.

Should the DNA mapping of my next child be something that I can invest in such a way that it gathers interest and eventually pays for that child’s collage education, should I be able to spend the details of my family tree with a restaurant who in return throw us a lavish family party. I might be able to make an explicit decision to invest details of my online browsing behaviour with a company that in return pays me with free email and search services, rather than the implicit decision that I make today.

Going even further out I can see several good reasons why we could see information management be a product offered by banks alongside our existing checking and savings accounts, providing customers with “billpay” functionality that allows them to control where personal information goes, how it is used, and what they get back in return.

This post isn’t in any way a complaint about the information companies that exist today, merely an attempt to provoke a little thought around what comes next.

In 2010 information is currency, there are multi-billion dollar companies standing as evidence to that point. My question is about what new opportunities we can create as we gain a greater understanding of information based business models, and at the same time how likely are we as individuals to be able to recognize the value of the information assets that we hold?

Posted in General | Tagged | 6 Comments

Ultra High Speed Standardization

Posted on March 19, 2010 by oliver

Originally posted on TalkStandards.com, 18/3/2010

Since I first got involved with eGovernment projects in the mid-nineties I have been encouraging governments that I have been working with to look towards international standards as a route to solving system interconnect challenges, an important step on the path to providing more predictable and useful services to the citizens and businesses that they work with.

More recently, along with everybody else in my field, I have found myself increasingly involved in eGovernment projects that are using Web2.0 technologies (sometimes called Gov2.0) to improve the way that they work with their constituents.

Working with these projects I have become aware of two factors that have changed the way that I think about a subset of the communication standards that the projects rely upon.

1. Companies like Facebook and Twitter are still evolving, rapidly and in real time. To maintain their pace of innovation they need to be able to constantly update the APIs and protocols that clients use to interconnect with them.
2. As software development has become more agile it is increasingly easier for developers to keep up with these rapid changes. The myriad of twitter clients that change as the TwitterAPI changes is a good example of this agile software development in action.

This change has led me to think more about the evolution of innovation, and when it should and should not intersect with a standardization process.

The whole curve introduces more complexity than would be suitable for this blog post, however to drive the conversation of today’s topic I would suggest that at the start of the curve, while services are still evolving and users requirements are still being understood, it frequently not appropriate to standardize these emerging technologies.

At the same time as companies like Twitter and Facebook have adopted a policy of publishing the details of their interfaces in an open and transparent manner they have provided a platform that is suitable for governments to adopt, in the way that those same governments could only have adopted internationally peer review standards in the past.

The Gov2.0 projects have introduced us to an era where we do see governments adopting technology that we would have considered emerging and unstable in previous years, and they are adopting those technologies with  success and a great deal of support from their citizens.

We have a new form of standardization that happens in real time, and governments around the world are already embracing it.

Posted in Standards | Leave a comment

Release Version of Open XML SDK v2 is now available

Posted on March 16, 2010 by oliver

image Several of my colleagues are talking about this today, after four successful technology preview releases the final version is now available. You can download version 2.0 of the Open XML SDK from the Microsoft Download Centre. For those of you working with Open XML documents, today also sees a revamp of the Open XML Developer Centre on MSDN.

For detailed information check out one of the blog entries from Brian Jones & Zeyad Rajabi, Eric White or Gray Knowlton.

Eric White has a great description of the two components of the SDK;

As with the CTPs, the RTM version of the Open XML SDK consists of two principle components:

  • A .NET managed class library that provides capabilities for reading, writing, modifying, and validating Open XML documents.

  • A productivity tool that includes the ability to diff Open XML documents, a C# code generator, and tools to explore and read about the class library and the standard.

About the Library

Some of the key characteristics of the library are:

  • You can use a powerful functional programming approach to write applications that generate documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

  • You can use Language Integrated Query (LINQ) to retrieve data and content from documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

  • You can write code to open, modify, and save documents.

  • You can use validation functionality to be more certain that your documents conform to the IS29500 standard and will be able to be opened using Microsoft Office and other conforming applications. Document formats, by their very nature, are involved. The validation functionality in the Open XML SDK is a big help when writing real-world solutions.

About the Tool

Key features of the tool are:

  • You can compare two Open XML documents to see exact changes in their markup. This is one of the best ways to learn about Open XML markup. If you want to understand which elements and attributes represent a feature that you want to interact with, create a document without the feature, copy the document to a new document, modify the new document, and compare to the old. After determining the elements and attributes that changed, you can research them in the Open XML specification.

  • You can build a document generation program with a minimum of effort. You supply the tool with a sample document. You can then generate C# code that that will generate the entire document, a specific part, or a specific element with its children elements. This code is generated in a style that takes advantage of ‘functional construction’. By this, I mean that any element (or its descendant elements) can be generated in a single expression. You don’t need to write multiple statements. This ability to generate content in an expression instead of a statement means that you can use LINQ queries and projections to formulate new descendant content for an element. It’s a powerful approach.

  • The ability to explore the Open XML specification, the implementation notes, and the Open XML SDK class hierarchy in the tool means that you have one integrated tool to do much of the work that is necessary to build sophisticated document generation systems.

Download the SDK

clip_image002

Download the Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office
This download provides strongly typed part and content classes for use with Office 2007 & Office 2010 Open XML documents. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c6e744e5-36e9-45f5-8d8c-331df206e0d0

Posted in Interoperability, Standards | Tagged | Leave a comment

Interop – some nuts and bolts

Posted on March 4, 2010 by oliver

Following on from a conversation with one of our customers in Australia earlier this morning I thought it might be worthwhile highlighting some of the more collaborative work we have been doing around interop over the last few years. 

A quick search will find a growing corpus of information, strategy papers with relevance to CxO level staff through to technical information that might be needed by developers on a day to day basis.

For the purpose of this post I’ll highlight just two pieces on the overall jigsaw puzzle, both of them demonstrating some of the work we have been doing to ensure that we’re more closely involved with the community of customers and developers that work with the Microsoft platform.

IECC-interoperability-White-Paper_3The first is a whitepaper that we recently published on the work of a group that we call the “Interoperability Executive Customer Council”.

The IECC was formed in June 2006, and it’s members are a cross section of senior executives that represent many of the segments where we do business. The group meets on a regular basis to discuss interoperability issues within six specific work streams, and then collaboratively work on solutions.

The six work streams are detailed in the whitepaper, along with many examples of the issues raised and the work that has been done (and is being done) to resolve them. They are;

Office Productivity and Collaboration Tools. Office file formats; Office programmability and automation; portal, document, and content management servers; back-end and line-of-business application integration; unified communication; etc.
Systems Management. IT operations management; deployment and patching of software; virtualization environments; etc. IT operations want to optimize the management of heterogeneous enterprise environments while providing top-notch service to users based on their service-level agreements.
Identity Management. Identity federation scenarios for providing partners and customers with encrypted access to internal resources; single sign-on (SSO) techniques; user-centric approaches to identity management through third-party providers and relying parties; and Active Directory–Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) integration.
Developer Tools and Runtime. Use of different development tools in a distributed environment; robust and high-performance interoperability between .NET and Java/mainframe applications; interoperability with open source languages and tools; consistent implementations of standard cryptology algorithms; etc.
Business Process Modelling (BPM) and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA). Facilitating design, development, and management of business processes to run across multiple platforms and systems using multiple, interoperable frameworks and tools for architecture and modelling.
Public Interoperability Policy. Guiding Microsoft in its approach to the Interoperability Principles and related initiatives, and informing Microsoft’s public policy positions for interoperability, intellectual property, privacy, and security.

Click on the graphic of the whitepaper above to download a copy and read the rest for yourself.

image

My second example is the “Interop Bridges and Labs Center” which is run by our Interoperability Strategy Group. The site has been around for about a year now and provides details on a growing array of point projects where Microsoft engineers are working with customers, partners or open source projects to solve specific interop challenges.

From the about page on the site;

The Interoperability Bridges and Labs Center is dedicated to technical collaborative work between Microsoft, customers, partners and open sources communities to improve interoperability between Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies.

The Center is run by the Microsoft Interoperability Strategy Group working with many other teams at Microsoft, with customers input and with the community at large to build technical bridges, labs and solutions to improve interoperability in mixed IT environments.

You will find full details on each of the projects that the team have completed by following this link. The team also maintains a blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/interoperability.

Posted in Interoperability | Tagged | Leave a comment

And you thought you were done with gov20…

Posted on February 2, 2010 by oliver

©iStockphoto.com.jgroup With several national gov20 plans now published I thought it would be worthwhile jotting down some reminders of the work that is still ahead if these plans are to be realized. Many of the items listed below represent opportunity for gov20 programmes, a couple are just unfinished items that never quite got solved last time around.

Deliver a well understood national digital identity program. Web20 offers some opportunities here, solutions like OpenID will work well for a large number of government services but may never quite go far enough when it comes to transactions that require more security or involve the transfer of funds between government and non-government entities.

Over the years many governments have experimented with national identity programs, and many have failed for one reason or another. A gov20 mindset offers the opportunity to try a new approach, federating a secure government identity program with other identity providers that citizens use every day from organizations like Microsoft, Google, Facebook or Twitter, along with the widely recognized and already federated approach of OpenID.

Not all government transactions need parties on either side to identify themselves, and very few need the security that is built into most government developed eID programs. In most cases the user just needs government to remember their preferences, and deliver the experience that they signed up for.

Deliver a SINGLE government experience. In many countries the gov20 experience is being rolled out on a department by department basis.

More traditional eGovernment programs have been very focused on delivering single and joined up government experiences for well over a decade now, and we need to ensure that we don’t lose sight of that focus as a more interactive gov20 experience takes hold.

As national governments reorganize and restructure the onus should not be on the citizen to know which department needs to manage the transaction that they need to complete. The nirvana of a citizen or a business being able to open a conversation with government as a single entity still feels like it is a long way off in a lot of jurisdictions.

Make transactions available externally, not just data. We’re all agreed that open government data is a powerful concept, we have already seen the possibilities as developers have built a wide array of new types of application that were hard to conceive without the data that government holds.

There is another optional step though.

Government don’t just hold data, government also has control over a vast number of transactions that could become integral parts of other applications, truly delivering citizen services in places where citizens expect to find them.

Imagine booking your next vacation. With your permission your favourite travel site should be able to check the validity of your passport, ensure you have a visa for your destination country and verify that you have the right vaccinations for the trip. As you travel home your credit card company should be able to interact with a government service to ensure that all that unnecessary sales tax that you spent is quickly refunded to you.

Internal government systems manage all of these transactions today (and about 10,000 more in any given country), it makes sense to allow others to build on them to provide new types of services that just can’t be offered today.

Semantic enablement of published datasets. My last post talked a little about the role of RDF in ensuring that we get value out of data that is published for external use.

As an international community we need to ensure that the semantic descriptors that are applied to datasets have some degree of harmony, allowing citizens to pull data from different jurisdictions to answer questions that they have.

A single understanding of published data would help consumers of these datasets at both ends of the scale. From a child using the data to complete a project for school, through to complex development of cross border policy.

Close the Digital Divide. This is an issue that never quite seems to go away, although many would argue that progress is being made. What we still rarely see however is clear articulation of how recently published gov20 plans will help close the digital divide, in fact in some cases the increasing numbers of services being offered online are only serving to make the problem worse.

New form factors for computing devices are certainly helping, and delivery of government services through technology that citizens already have access to (i.e. the TV, or the cell phone) is certainly a step in the right direction.

Gov20 plans need to carefully consider this issue in detail and find the right answer for their own national situation.

Posted in eGovernment | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Reforming the Reformist Agenda

Posted on January 31, 2010 by oliver

Originally posted on TalkStandards, 28/01/2010

Conversations about the governance of standards setting organizations will from time to time stray towards the topic of reform, along with the need for simplicity in the standards development process. I would argue that the complexity that we deal with today is both necessary and an important component of a functioning ICT industry.

Today SSOs are very diverse. Almost all of them produce both effective standards and standards that never achieve marketplace acceptance. But the flexibility, competition and choice that this ecosystem provides is healthy for the ICT industry. The processes by which ICT standards are created can vary greatly and are constantly evolving. Formal ICT standards are developed in formal SSOs, industry consortia, professional associations, and other industry groups. Many of these diverse organizations have open and published processes that allow all relevant stakeholders to participate and help to balance conflicting requirements. Other ICT SSOs are more focused and less formal collaborations, which can produce needed standards that are very targeted in nature or which can incubate standards for further standardization at a more formal SSO.

While this diversity and breadth of SSOs can be perceived as overwhelming, the truth is that it has emerged as a result of the market in which we all operate. It provides for flexibility, competition and choice. No one process can guarantee that every standard it produces has some level of immediate intrinsic value. No one standards body or process necessarily produces “better” standards; again the test of success and relevance of a standard is the extent to which it ultimately gets used in the marketplace. (As an example, the IETF TCP/IP standard became much more widely implemented than the ISO OSI standard despite the fact that ISO has produced many other very successful ICT standards.) SSOs routinely review their activities, procedures and policies, and they make improvements and changes as needed.

Standards-setting organizations also have collaborative actions and liaisons between themselves, and with other bodies that support related conformance or interoperability testing, business initiatives and so on. Many standards make references to other standards coming from other SSOs or have ratification processes that they apply to other SSOs’ work.

There is certainly no shortage of people who find the diversity of SSOs confusing and frustrating, and from time to time I find myself in that camp. However, any conversation about making changes to the broad array of standards setting processes that we know today has to dig deeply into why we are where we are, and has to recognize the many successful standards that are already implemented by in hardware and software by many hundreds of developers using every possible language and from every possible discipline.

While the subject of reform is an important discussion point when it comes to SSO governance we risk the word bringing an unnecessary level of drama along with it. What I would personally rather see is a broader array of voices collaborating in the ongoing work to evolve the process that we have today to meet the needs that we know the industry will have in years to come.

We have a proven, solid and working standards setting system in place today and in my view it is important that as a community and as an industry we continue to build upon that

Posted in Standards | Leave a comment

RDF and Open Government Data

Posted on January 18, 2010 by oliver

©iStockphoto.com.jpa1999More often than not the topic of RDF (W3C’s Resource Description Framework) comes up soon after you get into any conversation about open government data.  It comes up as the discussion strays into ways of making published datasets more valuable to developers and other potential consumers of any data that might be made available.

Well described and semantically tagged data is always going to be at the top end of that spectrum, with the additional metadata making it clearer to the developer what the purpose of the data is and how it can be used. 

I’ve talked before about how much work a government agency might want to put into publishing their data, and conversely how much use that data then is to consumers. With additional usefulness comes additional cost, complexity and governance. Individual governments will decide for themselves how far along this path they want to walk.

The Resource Description Framework (or RDF) has been around for the best part of a decade and was designed, in part, on the basis that we would eventually see massive amounts of machine processable data and information published for consumption on the web – exactly as we are beginning to see as governments publish various national and state level datasets.

As additional background reading on the topic, Tim Berners-Lee talks about how RDF might apply directly to Open Government Data in his June 2009 article: “Putting Government Data online”.

To help explain the concept the W3C have published a comprehensive RDF Primer, which begins with the introductory text;

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a language for representing information about resources in the World Wide Web. It is particularly intended for representing metadata about Web resources, such as the title, author, and modification date of a Web page, copyright and licensing information about a Web document, or the availability schedule for some shared resource. However, by generalizing the concept of a "Web resource", RDF can also be used to represent information about things that can be identified on the Web, even when they cannot be directly retrieved on the Web. Examples include information about items available from on-line shopping facilities (e.g., information about specifications, prices, and availability), or the description of a Web user’s preferences for information delivery.

RDF is intended for situations in which this information needs to be processed by applications, rather than being only displayed to people. RDF provides a common framework for expressing this information so it can be exchanged between applications without loss of meaning. Since it is a common framework, application designers can leverage the availability of common RDF parsers and processing tools. The ability to exchange information between different applications means that the information may be made available to applications other than those for which it was originally created.

… it then goes on to say;

[..] while English is good for communicating between (English-speaking) humans, RDF is about making machine-processable statements. To make these kinds of statements suitable for processing by machines, two things are needed:

  • a system of machine-processable identifiers for identifying a subject, predicate, or object in a statement without any possibility of confusion with a similar-looking identifier that might be used by someone else on the Web.
  • a machine-processable language for representing these statements and exchanging them between machines.

Anybody with an interest in this area should read both the full RDF primer and the W3C homepage for RDF.

As one further point I thought it might also be useful (in a slightly self serving way) to dig around and find areas where Microsoft has been working with RDF in either research projects, products or within various developer tools.

With the help of a colleague in Redmond we came up with the list below. It is not exhaustive, but does gives a representative sample of the type of work that the company is doing in this area;

Description

more information

ASP.NET

public link

Public Sector Communication and Collaboration Portal

public link

Connected Services Framework

public link

Interactive Media Manager

public link

Microsoft External Research as contributor to the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) initiative

public link

NReco

public link

OpenLink’s Virtuoso ADO.NET Entity Framework provider

public link

Profile Manager RDF Parser

public link

Rich Media Collaboration Services

public link

SharePoint

public link

SharePoint

public link

SharePoint

public link

(Portions of this article quote the WC3 Primer on RDF which is held under the Copyright of the W3C, full notice and further information: Copyright © 2004 W3C® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio), All Rights Reserved. W3C liability, trademark, document use and software licensing rules apply.)

Posted in eGovernment, Standards | Tagged , , | 3 Comments