New Program Introductions

New Program Reports Members Only
 

Agenda

You are invited to a series of meetings where we will be putting forward our ideas for new Programs on the following topics:

  • Transaction Processing
  • Application Services
  • Location Services
  • Core Information Exchange

These new Programs will cover areas that have been identified as key components of the IT DialTone TM architecture. The agenda for each Program is discussed below.

There will be two parallel sessions on Tuesday afternoon (following the Council Sessions). The same introductory presentation will be made at the start of each session and it will be feasible to swap between sessions at the break.

Tuesday 23rd Sept Session A Session B
2:00 p.m. Transaction Processing Core Information Exchange
3:30 p.m. Break Break
4:00 p.m. Application Services Location Services
5:30 p.m. end end

There will not be meetings of either the Interoperability or the Information Super Highway Program Groups in Boston. Instead, we suggest that:

  • Former members of the Interoperability Program Group may be interested to go to the sessions on Transaction Processing and Application Services, and
  • Former members of the Information Superhighway Program Group may be interested to go to the sessions on Core Information Exchange and Location Services.

Objectives of the Sessions

These sessions are effectively the "launch" of these four new programs that are critical to the implementation of IT DialTone. Part of kick-starting the programs will be:

  • to agree the scope of each Program
  • to initiate the collection of Infrastructure Requirements
  • to agree the way forward

It is not clear at this point whether the sessions will result in the establishment of Program Groups. Either way, we would expect the Programs to consist of major staff activity behind the scenes and for each to be reviewed at subsequent Member Conferences.

The New Process

IT DialTone epitomises interoperability and openness. Its vision is of a ubiquitous set of infrastructure services that provide a common environment for robust, secure and responsive network-wide computing. The Open Group will work to bring IT DialTone to reality via three major areas of activity:

  • establishing a comprehensive architecture for IT DialTone;
  • establishing specifications, standards, and branding mechanisms to define the implementation of that architecture, and
  • managing collaborative development efforts to demonstrate specific portions of the IT DialTone functionality.

Defining the customer requirements for IT DialTone and persuading vendors to build products to match them will demand careful coordination of the buy and supply side. To do this will mean that the Open Group must become a Trusted Forum in which all sides can reach a consensus. Putting this into practice efficiently has demanded the Open Group realign its process:

  • A new end-to-end Process has been developed with the help of members from all constituencies. This will be described in a Joint Councils session on Tuesday morning.
  • We are establishing four new Programs to coincide with the major sectors of the IT DialTone. Other sectors are already effectively addressed in the Security and Management Programs.
  • The primary task of each Program will be to capture IT needs (from both buy- and supply-sides) and work with professional IT architects from the Open Group to define specific Infrastructure requirements.
  • A new Architecture Board will take responsibility for the overall architecture of the IT DialTone and thus ensure each contribution to the IT infrastructure is fully interoperable. The objective will always be to cause the creation of products that satisfy business needs and to do this in a way that is rapid, cost effective and accountable.
  • Actual development work will be undertaken by specific Project Groups which will be professionally managed and accountable to the Architecture Board and the relevant Program.

The New Programs

The areas to be covered by each new Program are outlined below. For each we have summarised:

  • the contribution we expect it will make to the IT DialTone
  • the major technical challenges the Program will address.
Transaction Processing

Transaction Processing services are the foundation of on-line commercial data processing. Traditional on-line TP services have been defined by what are called the ACID properties (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability). IT DialTone Transaction Processing services will provide for the transactional semantics of enterprise systems to be extended across an infrastructure which is not under the control of any single organisation.

IT DialTone Transaction Processing will support ACID properties, with

  • Data transfer protocol independence (using existing protocols such as HTTP and FTP without the need for special purpose, TP specific, protocols)
  • Interoperability with heterogeneous and legacy systems;
  • Support for workflow and longer running transactions

Major challenges to be considered in the establishment if IT DialTone will include:

  • The determination of the extent to which it is desirable or necessary to support the full set of ACID properties across the networked infrastructure.
  • Support for interoperability with traditional procedural TP services running on enterprise systems
Core Information Exchange

Information Exchange is the fundamental underpinning of the IT DialTone architecture. It consists of data formats and protocols used for communication across the network between Information systems. Three layers are defined:

  • The Base Layer transmits packets over any physical communication medium The IT DialTone assumes support for the Internet Protocol (IP).
  • The Transport Layer transmits arbitrarily sized chunks of data between Information Systems and implements connections that support reliable delivery. The IT DialTone transport layer consists of TCP and UDP.
  • The Session Layer defines data formats and protocols as needed to support the use of the network for specific purposes. Examples are: file transfer, e-mail, graphics and executable code.

Major challenges to be considered in the establishment of IT DialTone will include:

  • The need to balance the demand for an ever richer set of data formats and protocols, with the need to define a core ubiquitous infrastructure
  • The imperative to migrate to IP version 6
  • The full integration of security considerations
Application Services

The IT DialTone infrastructure provides facilities for the interchange of information between applications, through the definition of generic data structures and all of the supporting services including :

  • Installation, update, de-installation of application software
  • Message based remote execution of applications (e.g. CORBA)
  • Remote execution of applications with local display (e.g. The X Window System)
  • Download and execution of applications (e.g. JAVA, ActiveX)



Major challenges to be considered in the establishment of IT DialTone will include:

  • The need to establish an acceptable level of coexistence and interoperability between object models
  • The need to achieve a balance between innovation and standardization as technology such as JAVA and ActiveX evolves
Location Services

IT DialTone Location Services provide service consumers with the ability to locate and use required resources of all kinds across the network.

IT DialTone Location Services will support:

  • Policies for identifying resources (names, identifiers, attributes, properties etc.) and for matching criteria (schema, rules, filters, constraint languages etc.)
  • Multiple resource organisations (hierarchical, unstructured, meshes etc.) and structural rules (name and type based, attributes and keywords etc.).
  • The needs of different consumer types (general public, business, programmers, administrators).
  • Fuzzy searches (e.g., human users may only have a vague idea of the kind of service they need) and approximations (e.g., similarly pronounced words, equivalent services but not of the same class).

Major challenges to be considered in the establishment of IT DialTone will include

  • The extensible, global support of many types of resources, including information, user accounts, physical entities and nodes, and services, with scaleability across enterprise boundaries.
  • The application of selection constraints to locate required resources in a potentially global network