paul walk’s weblog

The Higher Education sector has invested a lot of time and effort into the development and adoption of open standards. Interoperability has, for some time, been one of the key design-principles in the development of new software and services. Developers working in projects funded by JISC for example are, necessarily, at pains to demonstrate that their solution uses open standards where possible in order to ensure interoperability. Would I be amiss if I suggested that there are some who have been satisfied to leave it there?

Interoperability is a capability, no more. We assert that our software can interoperate, with other software which has adopted that same open standards. This is important, but it is not enough. The final proof, that the approach of ensuring interoperability through open standards has been worth the candle, is when systems actually interoperate to some useful purpose.

I propose that we have enough interoperability to be getting on with. What we need now, is interoperation!

Technorati Tags: higher education, interoperability, interoperation, JISC

An interesting post by Mike Neuenschwander on the Burton Group Identity Blog. I’m not certain I agree entirely with the main thrust of Mike’s argument, which he offers as an axiom:

There are no identifiers, only attributes

That is to say, things are identified by their existence as a collection of attributes in a given context. Some of Mike’s claims, such as “most people have [...] several dozen nicknames” seem a little exaggerated. However, his concluding remarks are interesting:

I understand why from a programmer’s perspective, it would be so much more convenient if everybody could simply have one globally unique, unambiguous, resolvable name. But such a quaint design constitutes a wanton disregard for reality.

The tech industry is adolescently ID-fixated.

I am professionally interested in identifiers, and am aware of serious interest in the notion of the creation of ‘authoritative’ resolution services for names, in the domain of the publication and use of scholarly work. The ability to reliably cite authors of scholarly works would surely be a good thing. But this requirement has been around for a long time now, and is still not satisfied.

Is the “adolescence” of the industry a barrier to pursuing a solution which doesn’t show a “wanton disregard for reality”?

Technorati Tags: burton group, identifiers, openid, Mike Neuenschwander

I had a little problem to solve the other day where I wanted to work up a database from scratch, and then transfer data from an existing database into it. On the spur of the moment I decided to see how quickly/easily this could be done in Ruby. Long story short, the thing I learned (obvious in hindsight) is that:

require 'rubygems'
require_gem 'activerecord'

is all you need to get access to all that ActiveRecord modeling goodness outside of the Rails framework proper (assuming Rails is installed on your system). The real pay-off is being able to use migrations to develop the database schema. I wrote a simple script to call the conventional ‘up’ and ‘down’ methods of my migration classes, mostly because I hadn’t appreciated how simple it would be configure Rake for this purpose outside of a Rails application. I’ll know next time.

When I think of the hours I’ve spent with various ORM frameworks in Java….

Technorati Tags: ActiveRecord, Rails, Ruby, RubyOnRails