Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Archive for the ‘Semantics’ Category

Dan Foody of Progress Software had an interesting blog recently called UDDI in a Web 2.0 World. In it, he asks:

SOA What? With all of this Web 2.0 development, it’s clear that internet scale folksonomies work far better than taxonomies. On the other hand enterprises are, for the most part, stuck with UDDI-related SOA governance tools and their strict taxonomy and categorization mechanisms. The open question though… is this really a problem?

Aside: I love the use of SOA What? That’s exactly why I try to always say S-O-A. On the subject, however, I think Dan raises an interesting question. One of the questions I’ve asked some of the registry/repository vendors is “Can you be indexed by a Google Appliance?” Admittedly, I’m not a huge fan of taxonomy-based searching. At the same time, however, a typical enterprise asset repository may not have enough critical mass to get appropriate metadata for folksonomy based searching. The Web is filled with hyperlinks. How many links to a service detail page am I going to have inside a typical enterprise?

Personally, I’d rather try to find a way to build up the metadata than go crazy building taxonomies to support direct navigation. First off, you can quickly get into taxonomy hell where there are so many variations that you try to support that it becomes difficult to present to the user. Second, people are so used to using Google, Desktop Search, Spotlight, etc. Universal search is going to be a standard part of the office toolset, and we need to find a way to ensure relevant results get returned. This will likely require analysis of software development artifacts (including source code) and building up those relationships based upon presence within project repositories and the role of the user performing the search. A developer performing a search will want to see very different results when searching on “Customer service” than a business manager.

The challenge we face is that the documents and their metadata are scattered all over the place. I previously asked if metadata should be the center of the SOA universe. Neil Ward-Dutton replied that it the center of the universe, and is inherently federated. We need intelligent crawlers that can infer the appropriate relationships and feed this into the universal search engine. Is anyone out there leveraging a Google appliance or other universal search option to facilitate searching for services and other IT assets? If so, like Dan, I’d love to hear about your experiences.

The latest Briefings Direct: SOA Insights podcast is now available. In this episode, we discussed semantic web technologies, among other things. One of my comments in the discussion was that I feel that these technologies have struggled to reach the mainstream because we haven’t figured out a way to make it relevant to the developers working on projects. I used this same argument in the panel discussion at The Open Group EA Practitioners Conference on July 23rd. In thinking about this, I realized that there is a strong connection in this thinking and SOA. Simply put, it is all about the consumer.

Back when my day-to-day responsibilities were programming, I had a strong interest in human-computer interaction and user interface design. The reason for this was that the users were the end consumer of the products I was producing. It never ceased to amaze me how many developers designed user interfaces as if they were the consumer of the application, and wound up giving the real consumer (the end user) a very lousy user experience.

This notion of a consumer-first view needs to be at the heart of everything we do. If you’re an application designer, it doesn’t bode well if you consumer hate using your application. Increasingly, more and more choices for getting things done are freely available on the Internet, and there’s no shortage of business workers that are leveraging these tools, most likely under the radar. If you want your users to use your systems, the best path is make it a pleasant experience for them.

If you’re an enterprise architect, you need to ask who the consumers of your deliverable are? If you create a reference architecture that is only of interest to your fellow enterprise architects, it’s not going to help the organization. If anything, it’s going to create tension between the architecture staff and the developers. Start with the consumer first, and provide material for what they need. A reference architecture should be used by the people coming up with a solution architecture for projects. If your reference architecture is not consumable by that audience, they’ll simply go off and do their own thing.

If you are developing a service, you need to put your effort into making sure it can be easily consumed if you want to achieve broad consumption. It is still more likely today that a project will build both service consumer and service provider. As a result, the likelihood is that the service will only be easily consumable by that first consumer, just as that user interface I mentioned earlier was only easily consumed by the developer that wrote it.

How do we avoid this? Simple: know your consumer. Spend some time on understanding your consumer first, rather than focusing all of your attention on knowing your service. Ultimately, your consumers define what the “right” service is, not you. You can look at any type of product on the market today, and you’ll see that the majority of products that are successful are the ones that are truly consumer friendly. Yes, there are successful products that are able to force their will on consumers due to market share that are not considered consumer friendly, but I’d venture a guess that these do not constitute the majority of successful products.

My advice to my readers is to always ask the question, “who needs to use this, and how can I make it easy for them?” There are many areas of IT that may not be directly involved with project activities. If you don’t make that work relevant to project activities, it will continue to sit off on an island. If you’re in a situation where you’re seen as an expert in some space, like semantic technologies, and the model for using those technologies on project is to have yourself personally involved with those projects, that doesn’t scale. Your efforts will not be successful. Instead, focus on how to make the technology relevant to the problems that your consumers need to solve, and do it in a way that your consumers want to use it, because it makes their life easier.

Rob High of IBM is on the stage now with a presentation titled “SOA Foundation” which runs the gamut of topics associated with SOA. One thing he took a lot of time to discuss was the notion of coherency and the importance of semantics to SOA. It was nice to hear some emphasis on this point, as I believe that an understanding of the semantics is a critical component in moving from SOA applied to applications to SOA applied to the enterprise. Just as with the rest of SOA, make sure you understand the semantics first before throwing any semantic technology at it. While there are evolving specs and tools in this space, none of that will do you any good if don’t first understand the semantics themselves and how that information can be leveraged in your project efforts.