Ontology Outreach Advisory

Today, with the publication of the French translation of the RDF Test Cases by Jean-Jacques Solari, the whole suite of RDF Recommendations are available in French. In view of the complexity of those documents, the two translators (Xavier Lacot and Jean-Jacques Solari) deserve the community’s thanks…

Note that the only other language with a full translation is Hungarian (done by Ernő Pataki), with some documents available in Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Polish, and Russian. Hopefully more will follow…

The W3C Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) Working Group has published two Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) Working Drafts: Grouping of Resources and Description Resources. The first document describes how to publish descriptions of multiple resources such as all those available from a Web site. These descriptions are always attributed to a named individual, organization or entity that may or may not be the creator of the described resources. The second publication provides a means for individuals or organizations to create machine-readable descriptions.

The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group and XHTML2 Working Group have published a Candidate Recommendation of RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing. Web documents contain significant amounts of structured data, which is largely unavailable to tools and applications. When publishers can express this data more completely, and when tools can read it, a new world of user functionality becomes available, letting users transfer structured data between applications and web sites, and allowing browsing applications to improve the user experience. RDFa is a specification for attributes to be used with languages such as HTML and XHTML to express structured data. See the groups' RDFa implementation report (although this document is still evolving as new implementations come in). The Working Groups also updated the companion document RDFa Primer.

A set of RDFa technology buttons have also been published, linked in from the Semantic Web logos' index page.

Dear Colleague,

Great news. It’s now going to be easy to attend the HR Technology Conference on October 15-16, right after the HR-XML Summit, October 13-14, in Chicago. Easy enough even for me! And with special discounts for attending both.

The two events have finally co-located in time and space so that you can stay in the same room in the Hyatt McCormick all week and attend both, one right after the other. The Summit is in the Hyatt, and HR Technology is across the street in McCormick Place.

You know I’ve been urging you to attend HR Technology for several years because I think it’s the best possible use of *my* precious professional development time — and yours.

Chuck Allen of HR-XML calls it “THE show for those in the HR tech community,” and I agree. After 11 years, it is undisputedly at the top of the heap — worldwide.

I’ve attended every one since 1998 as a charter member of its original Analyst Panel, the only public gathering where leading industry analysts give straight answers to the toughest questions in our field.

And don’t miss “The Industry’s First Talent Management Shootout” this year, your only chance to see leading Talent Management suite vendors competing head-to-head with custom demos against some tough, scripted scenarios.

Please look over the full agenda at www.HRTechnologyConference.com and join me there. I’ll be doing the Analyst Panel again (of course) was well as a special Expert Discussion on Thursday afternoon. I hope I’ll see you there.

Now here’s how you can save the most money on both events:

Start at www.partneringsummit.com and register for the Summit, being careful to choose the 30 percent discounted price just for HR Technology attendees.

After your e-mail confirmation, you’ll get a special discount code for the second event, good only for double attendees. I’m keynoting the Summit, with many thanks to Lawson Software for their sponsorship, and look forward to seeing you there.

Then go to http://www.hrtechnologyconference.com/register.html and type the case sensitive code from your e-mail confirmation into the Promotion Code field on the online registration form. You’ll save $550, a discount the HR-XML Consortium personally negotiated for you, the deepest they offer so you pay only $995.

Then call the Hyatt McCormick at 312-567-1234, tell them you’re with HR-XML, and book for as many days as need to cover both events at the discounted conference rate.

Why can’t all the meetings in our professional lives be this easy, complementary and close together?

Block the dates on your calendar, get purchase orders in process, bring a colleague and plan to join me for a truly valuable learning experience.

I’ll look forward to seeing you at both conferences.

Best regards,

Naomi

A group of experts from Audi, Achievo Inproware, and ontoprise published a new Semantic Web Use Case, as part of the SW Case Study and Use Case collection. It describes a system used for the simulation of car electronics systems, helping the development of new electronics components. An interesting aspect, from the Semantic Web point of view, is the way knowledge from various IT systems, users, engineers, etc., could be integrated using a combination of domain specific ontologies and rules.

Alexandre Passant has published a new Semantic Web Case Study, as part of the SWEO Collection. It describes a system deployed at the R&D department of Electricité de France (EDF), and shows how to integrate enterprise level social software (blogs, wikis, tagging, etc.) into a coherent user tool using Semantic Web technologies.

One of the interesting points is that, although this is an “intranet” application, the system makes also use of the various open datasets that the Linking Open Data project has made available for the Semantic Web, like Geonames or DBPedia (the latter through a separate, tagging software called MOAT). Ie, the system is a bona fide application of the LOD project for real users, in a real environment…

David Connelly, CEO, Open Application Group has announced the availability of the OAGIS 9.3 Release Candidate (9.3 RC1). Take a look.

One of the items David mentions below is the “OAGIS Business Integration Platform for
standards developers.” What is that about? It is an platform architecture into which horizontal standards like HR-XML and vertical standards groups like Starstandards.org, AIAG.org, and other groups with OAGIS-based architectures can plug-in. If you are an HR-XML implementer that wants to use a bit of OAGIS, or if you are a STAR or OAGIS implementer that wants to mix in some HR-XML, this will be a great convenience. My personal hope would be that some of the learning and education standards will buy into the platform concept.

David Connelly writes:

I am very pleased to announce that OAGIS 9.3 Release Candidate One is
now available for Public Review. This process is done to ensure the
highest quality possible standards available to our users.

This phase is expected to last 30 days after which time we will take the
Release Candidate off the web site, review all feedback, and make the
changes deemed necessary by our member driven quality assurance team.
We will then prepare the final version of OAGIS 9.2 and post it for
general availability.

This is a very exciting release of OAGIS with some never before features
including:

1) High Tech Order To Cash and Procure to Pay support
2) Mid Market version of OAGIS for Order to Cash
3) The first release of the new OAGIS Business Integration Platform for
standards developers

We encourage people to download and review this Release Candidate and to
give us your feedback.

You can learn more and download the standard here.

On May 26-28th, the RIF WG met in Galway, Ireland for its 10th face to face meeting. The three-day meeting hosted by DERI, Galway set a record with 40 resolutions passed, including decisions to publish the RIF-BLD (Basic Logic Dialect) and the RIF SWC (RDF&OWL Compatibility) specs as last call. With a little editorial work remaining after the meeting, the group plans to publish BLD and SWC on June 23, as well as moving all the other current drafts to the next public WD stage.

The RIF F2F10 page can be found here.

The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group has published a Working Draft of SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Reference. This document defines the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), a common data model for sharing and linking knowledge organization systems via the Semantic Web. SKOS aims to provide a bridge between different communities of practice within the library and information sciences involved in the design and application of knowledge organization systems. In addition, SKOS aims to provide a bridge between these communities and the Semantic Web, by transferring existing models of knowledge organization to the Semantic Web technology context, and by providing a low-cost migration path for porting existing knowledge organization systems to RDF. See also the changes from the previous draft.

The W3C Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group has published two Group Notes: A Prototype Knowledge Base for the Life Sciences and Experiences with the conversion of SenseLab databases to RDF/OWL. The former describes a prototype of a biomedical knowledge base that integrates 15 distinct data sources using currently available Semantic Web technologies including RDF and OWL. The Note outlines which resources were integrated, how the knowledge base was constructed using free and open source triple store technology, how it can be queried using SPARQL, and what resources and inferences are involved in answering complex queries. While the utility of the knowledge base is illustrated by identifying a set of genes involved in Alzheimer's Disease, the approach described here can be applied to any use case that integrates data from multiple domains. The second document describe the experience of converting SenseLab databases into OWL, an important step towards realizing the benefits of Semantic Web in integrative neuroscience research.

Chime Ogbuji, Scott Marshall and I are very excited to be co-chairing the new W3C Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLSIG).

We'd like to start off by giving a big thank you to Eric Neumann and Tonya Hongsermeier for having chaired the first HCLSIG, and for having got such a great group of people involved.

We are going to be hosting an initial kickoff call between 11am and 12.30pm ET on June 12, where we will introduce the group, describe the benefits of joining, summarize the new charter, highlight our thoughts for interesting projects, and share details about the first F2F meeting.

This is an excellent time for new people to join the HCLSIG. If you are interested in learning more, or participating in the call, please send an email to the co-chairs at: team-hcls-chairs@w3.org

An overdue thanks to Susan Malaika, IBM Senior Technical Staff Member, for terrific webinar on XML databases earlier this month. Susan’s slide deck is available for download. You can find a recording of the event below.

Even if your applications are bound to world of relational databases, I think there is a nugget or two you can take away from this webinar. Each implementer needs to assess the costs and benefits of design choices within their own contexts, but there are definitely patterns to avoid as well as patterns to follow.

Database design is an early and continuing concern for HR-XML implementers. Regarding “continuing concerns” — these tend to be along the lines of what will new versions of a schema will do to my application and underlying database? Or what if my trading partner supports HR-XML elements that I don’t yet support in my database? While XML databases aren’t magic, they certainly are more adaptable to these types of changes than pure relational databases. I’m sure Susan’s presentation will motivate a few currently working with XML and relational databases to take a new look XML native databases.

What Susan calls “shredding” — relying completely on fixed mapping of XML to relational databases — is certainly something to try to avoid. Yet this is where a lot of people tend to start. I don’t know how many people have asked me over the years for a relational database schema for HR-XML’s Resume or Candidate XML schema. While there are tools that can auto-generate SQL for database tables from an XML schema, I think in most cases you’d wind up with a real mess if you tried this with an HR-XML schema. If you are tied to relational databases and fixed mapping, the likely place to start isn’t with the XML schema, but with a survey of the representative XML instances you’ll need to handle. In the webinar, Susan makes the distinction between “master data” and “transactional data” and shows how the IBM pureXML provides some slick solutions for both (no endorsement here, I’m sure our friends at Oracle and other database vendors could show us similar capabilities). Even if you are stuck in the pure relational world, it is advisable to make the distinction between the master data that drive core business applications and the less-persistent transactional data that you occasionally need to retrieve. So the idea is to start with an analysis of representative instance data and then do your analysis of what is master data and what is less than master data. You then go to the trouble of “shredding” (fixed mapping) of the master data to relational database fields and then perhaps you store the entire XML doc as a CLOB for later retrieval.

Among the compelling features Susan demonstrated that should be of interest to the HR community were the pureXML DB’s capabilities with XQuery and Atom. Setting up flexible reporting mechanisms with arms-length trading partners usually is quite challenging. With the approach Susan demonstrated, setting up custom, real-time feeds is quite trivial. Just about any status or state you can express with HR-XML (e.g., open staffing requisitions placed since last week by major client X) could be converted to an Atom feed with very little effort.

See for yourself.

[ Slides ]

This is a deck I’ve mentioned in previous posts. If you are an HR-XML implementer and haven’t already taken a look, take some time to review and to understand some of the foundation behind HR-XML 3.0. You can view in full-screen or download by following the “view” link.

There are quite a few items I’d like to report from this week’s ePortfolio & Digital Identity Conference. For now, let me just get my slides out, which I’ve promised to post here. You can also download the deck (follow “view” link back to the slideshare.net site and download).

I also want to thank the EIfEL community for the opportunity to participate.

Last year, I wrote a post and provided some links to a site where IBM had demonstrations of using industry standard XML schemas within “pureXML” databases. As mentioned below, how to work with HR-XML and databases is likely at the top of our all-time list of frequently asked questions. If you haven’t looked at the capabilities of XML native databases, you’ll want to register for this free webinar. What really makes this interesting is the combination of an XML-aware database, technologies such as XQuery and XPath, and Web 2.0 technologies such as Atom and related syndication technologies. From a business point of view, what all this technology can add up to is savings in database and application design and some very flexible and dynamic ways to extend your customer’s or trading partner’s view into transactional data.

Using HR-XML With a pureXML Database
Wednesday, May 21, 2008 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM EDT
(10:00 AM - 11:30 AM PDT)

One of the questions most frequently asked by those implementing HR-XML is how do I map it into a database? While some may take on the task of mapping HR-XML to fields in their relational databases, there are alternatives.

This webinar describes how you can store, index, and query HR-XML easily without first mapping to relational structures. Compared to relational database storage, the pureXML database approach can offer considerable design and development savings. Schema evolution becomes much easier as there is no longer any need to re-structure the way data is stored in the face of HR-XML structure changes. For added flexibility, there is no need to associate exactly one schema with the stored XML, the appropriate version of the HR-XML schema can be used. New SOA, Web Services, Web 2.0, Mashup and Forms solutions for HR-XML become easier to build.

A pureXML HR-XML solution will be described and illustrations will be provided through interactive demonstrations and downloads that you can find through by typing Google pureXML alphaWorks.

Register today for this free webinar:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/268212569

About the Presenter

Susan Malaika is a Senior Technical Staff Member in IBM’s Information Management Group in the DB2 pureXML team. She has developed standards that support data for grid environments at the Global Grid Forum. Her specialties include XML, the Web and Web Services. In addition to working as an IBM product software developer, she has also been an Internet specialist, a data analyst, and an applications designer and developer. Susan has co-authored a book about Web tools, and published articles on transaction processing and XML. She is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology.

HR-XML’s 2nd annual Global Partnering & Integration Summit is months away (Oct. 13-14, Hyatt Regency McCormick Place, Chicago), but I’m really pleased that the industry is stepping up to support the one event held by the HR services industry for the HR services industry. Below are some of our event sponsors. To learn more about the conference, sponsorship, exhibit opportunities, or attending, please visit www.partneringsummit.org. If you missed the 2007 inaugural Partnering & Integration Summit, here’s where you can get a look at presentations and pictures from last year’s event.

Gold Sponsor

Ultimate Software is a leading provider of end-to-end strategic human resources, payroll, and talent management solutions, Ultimate Software markets award-winning UltiPro as licensed software and as on-demand services to customers including Elizabeth Arden, The New York Yankees Baseball Team, and Nintendo of America. For further information, visit www.ultimatesoftware.com or telephone 1-800-432-1729.

Keynote Sponsor

Lawson provides software and service solutions to 4,000 customers in the manufacturing, distribution, maintenance and service sector industries across 40 countries. Our mission is to make your company successful. How do we know if you’re succeeding? We spend a lot of time with customers, measuring their progress. Based on these measurements, we believe we offer more value per dollar invested than any other ERP company For further information, visit: www.lawson.com

Partner

The HR Technology® Conference & Expo is the world’s leading conference on technology for human resources. HR-XML’s Global Partnering & Integration Summit is co-located with the 11th annual HR Technology® Conference, October 15 - 17, 2008, McCormick Place, Chicago. For further information, visit: www.hrtechconference.com

Partner

The Open Applications Group Inc. (the OAGi) promotes business process interoperability for both inter & intra enterprise business. OAGi was formed in late 1994 as the first post-EDI organization focused on improving application integration. OAGi’s unique, technology neutral approach to building the Open Application Group Integration Specification (OAGIS) ensures that both end-users and solution providers have the most robust, interoperable, and completely royalty-free XML standard in the world. For further information, visit: www.openapplications.org

A “holy grail” for some with respect to online recruiting would be data standards that would enable job postings to essentially serve as a query against any segment of the world-wide set of resumes or CVs on the Web. The vision is that this might evolve into a real electronic market where talent supply and demand could be matched in a precise, on-demand way. What stands in the way of this automagic, world-wide matching of talent supply and demand? This sometimes perplexes those coming at the question from the purely from technical side, but is almost immediately apparent to recruiting professionals.

What do recruiters know that takes longer for the techies to grasp? — that recruiting is still predominantly a complex set of marketing communications with employers marketing themselves to candidates and visa versa. The big issue is not one of syntax or technology, but of reliable information and understanding. Job postings as well as resumes and CVs are designed as persuasive marketing pieces. Matching “marketing piece” to “marketing piece” has some value in the discovery phase of a search for a prospective candidate (or employer), but such discovery is just a first step in a search. The mostly-obvious problem with the “holy grail” vision of the web itself functioning as an electronic market for directly matching talent supply and demand, is the lack of transparent, reliable, and comparable data with which to perform matches.

What is the state of job and candidate data on the web? I’m not sure whether the state of online job postings and resumes is getting any worse, but I don’t see evidence that it is getting any better. On the employer side of things, you still too often see a hodge-podge of skills strewn within job postings. Rather than being a solid attempt to describe a position coherently, I suspect these “skill laundry lists” often are related to a recruiters’ attempts to optimize postings for search engine discovery or a manager’s or the HR department’s attempt to try to cover all bases or to stay ahead of skill and technology trends. On the candidate side of things, outright resume fraud might be less common than it once was, but with regard to the gray area of claiming skills or experience on a resume, the “burden-of-proof” standard is very low or non-existent. Of course, one set of behavior — employers creating job postings with insane skill laundry lists — obviously encourages the other — candidates exaggerating their skills or experience in resumes.

The other current challenge (and opportunity) is that for a growing number of knowledge workers there can be more relevant and meaningful information about the individuals’ capabilities located within social media and Web 2.0 content than in conventional resume or CV content. The ePortfolio community has long championed the value of self-maintained collections of learning and professional history and plans. However, consider even something even very simple and informal like a person’s twitter time line or bookmarks on del.icio.us. What might you learn from such content? This is hit-or-miss. However, certainly in some cases, you might find a rather complete work history and even a record of milestones and deliverables (amongst details about life’s minutia) . Such content also sometimes might provide a way to reality check claimed interests and experience within a resume.

Of course, not everyone’s twitter time line will be illuminating. Social media by its very nature is pretty scrappy data and likely should never be used on its own to either qualify or disqualify a candidate. My point is that these bread crumbs of personal and professional experience in many cases are certainly as valuable or more valuable than the typical laundry list of asserted skills or experience within a resume. There are wide-ranging personal comfort levels (and discomfort levels) associated with living and working in a transparent way on the Web via blogs, social and professional networking, photo sharing, calendars sharing, social bookmarking, etc. However, clearly we already are well into a new era in which data from a person’s social graph and self-contributed web content can be as important as traditional resume or CV content. For that matter, resumes and job announcements are well on their way to simply becoming part of the fabric of social network profiles and news feed content.

So how do standards and data formats fit in? Standards and data formats increasingly provide a critical foundation for making social graph content usable for recruiting and job search or any other purpose. While standards and data formats by themselves do nothing, fortunately there is no shortage of commercial, community, and individual development efforts aimed at delivering new applications and new ways of working with social graph content.

As I’ve said in previous posts, Microformats fit the bill for adding light structure and intelligence to browser-consumable profile, job, and social graph content. In this regard, Microformats aid both the discovery of candidates/jobs and also provide key linkages to related content and contacts. However, discovery and sourcing data is just the start of a recruiting process. A state-of-the-art approach to recruiting almost always involves follow-on, value-added processes aimed at normalizing such data for comparison, validating it, and correlating it with other data sources. It is among these follow-on processes where HR-XML will continue to be most important. HR-XML will continue to be the right fit for the system-to-system communication of candidate and job posting data as well as a principal output format for resume parsers. An area where you’ll growth in the use of HR-XML also is as an intermediate format that social networking applications use to pre-populate third-party job application forms with detailed profile data or otherwise share such profile data with employer or partner systems at the direction of the candidate. Changes planned within HR-XML 3.0’s recruiting specifications will be a topic for a future post, but broadly speaking I think you’ll see additional documents defined aimed at better supporting use cases involving the submission of formatted (even Microformatted) advertising content as well as additional structured representations of position and candidate data aimed at fulfilling what are mainly partner-to-partner interactions between HR service providers.

W3C organized a workshop on Video on the Web in December 2007 in order to share current experiences and examine the technologies (see report). Online video content and demand is increasing rapidly, becoming omnipresent on the Web and the trend will continue for at least a few years. These rapid changes are posing challenges to the underlying technologies and standards that support the platform-independent creation, authoring, encoding/decoding, and description of video. To ensure the success of video as a “first class citizen” of the Web, the community needs to build a solid architectural foundation that enables people to create, navigate, search, and distribute video, and to manage digital rights.

The general scope of the proposed Video on the Web activity is to provide cohesion in the video related activities of W3C, as well helping other W3C Groups in their effort to provide video functionalities. In addition, this activity will focus at implementing the next steps from the W3C workshop on Video on the Web. The proposal is to create 3 new Working Groups around Video on the Web. Please, have a look at the following documents:

1. Activity proposal
2. Media Fragments Working Group Charter
3. Media Best Practices and Guidelines Working Group Charter
4. Media Annotations Working Group Charter

We welcome general feedback, general expressions of interest (or lack of!) and comments on the discussion list public-video-comments@w3.org.

Philippe Le Hégaret will be presenting the activity proposal during the Web Conference this week, on Thursday afternoon.

There is now a great volume of material available on the Web comparing Web services built using WS-* stack technologies to those built using RESTful design principles. Just weeks ago, Burton Analyst Kurt Cagle offered us what practically was a short-course on RESTful web services design and its origins.

As I’ve mentioned in past posts, the HR domain is amazingly diverse. There are many back-office, computer-to-computer collaborations between HR trading partners for which the WS-* stack is still likely the best fit today and for the future. Yet on the other hand, HR also deploys a great and growing number of browser-consumable, computer-to-human services. In fact, the diversity of requirements is such, that one can easily imagine a company having both types of interfaces even for the same underlying resources or services (e.g., a WS-* based back-office service for handling high-volume, computer-to-computer submissions of job postings as well as a RESTful service to handle human-initiated job postings from a business-partner’s website). So it is realistic to expect these two approaches for web services to live side-by-side within the same organization. This leads to the premise behind of this post, which is that if you are faced with supporting both these web services design styles, or if you are looking for architecture that could help you migrate from one-style to the other, there are some patterns within the forthcoming HR-XML 3.0 architecture that could be helpful.

Where We’ve Been

A recently revised set of WSDL’s for HR-XML’s 2.5 Assessment specification is illustrative of our design approaches within the 2.* series of releases. There are two WSDLs: One for a service hosted by the customer and the other for a related service hosted by the provider. These aren’t normative, rather, they are intended as “starter-kit” templates for implementers. The WSDLs import types from the HR-XML Assessment schemas, wrap those types in messages defined within the WSDL target namespace, set out operations (input/output/fault, etc.) within a PortType, bind those operations to SOAP, and then provide a place for implementers to specify a network endpoint to which requests would be sent.

You can characterize the definitions within these WSDLs as being more “activity-based” than “resource-oriented.” The example I’ll carry through this post is the retrieval of an assessment order status. In the 2_5 design, this is accomplished using a “GetAssessmentStatus” method. The input is a GetAssessmentStatus message, which brings in the hrxml:AssessmentRequestType. This is a special-purpose type with just the thin bit of data you might need to retrieve an assessment status (most importantly an OrderId). The output is a “ShowAssessmentResult.” In the output, either a status is returned, or, if one is available, the completed assessment result.

Where We Are Going

You can’t really describe the Business Object Document (BOD) architecture within HR-XML 3.0 as “RESTful,” but it is fair to characterize it as “resource oriented” (at least compared to the “activity-oriented,” RPC approach covered above). A BOD is a message that creates a “business object” or reads, updates, cancels (etc.) such a business object. Rather than use a special-purpose message to request status, the usual approach using BODs would be to take the “noun” representing the object/resource in question and combine it with the appropriate verb type from the OAGIS library. Rather than using the special-purpose message to call a particular method (e.g., GetAssessmentStatus), the HR-XML 3.0 noun contains all the properties necessary to fulfill the purpose of the particular business object, including a “Status Property.” So using the BOD approach, you’d combine the standard OAGIS “Get” verb together the AssessmentReport noun into a GetAssessmentReport BOD. The response to a GetAssessmentReport would be a ShowAssessmentReport. An XPath within the Get verb’s expression element would be used to set the scope of what you want evaluated or considered in processing the request. An action code communicates what is to be done within that scope. Then fields such as OrderID are used within the noun to specify a particular order (Order no 1234) to retrieve. In the BOD syntax, this might look like so:

So compared to the 2_5 approach, there are no special-purpose messages. Broadly speaking, requests are fashioned and fulfilled by setting a scope within the associated business object, specifying the action to apply, and including necessary field values. See the slide deck from the “BOD Mechanics” session at HR-XML’s Atlanta meeting for an in-depth treatment of this subject.

Getting RESTful

The public API for a RESTful web service principally is a set of URIs. This set of URIs, when properly designed and conceived, becomes “a resource architecture.” Basically, the idea is to come up with a URI template scheme that allows you expose a URI for every piece of data that your users or trading partners need to operate on. In other words, the URI, like the XPath in the above BOD scenario, sets the scope of what it is that will be operated upon or considered in a particular interaction. The idea of one URI for each piece of data is a significant departure from the WS-* style of web services, in which there is typically a single URI designated as the network endpoint to which many different method requests go.

RESTful APIs often are presented in a matrix-style table format, which indicate the URI template to use with which HTTP verb to accomplish particular types of outcomes (e.g., creating new resource instances, reading the state of resources, updating resources, etc.). Like the BOD approach, there is a separation of verb and resource instead of building semantics into a special-purpose method request. So to carry through the AssessmentReport example introduced above, a RESTful implementation might rely on a URI template like the one below:

http://www.reallygoodassessments.com/v1/AssessmentReport/{OrderID}

So to get a status or retrieve a completed report, you’d use an HTTP Get and insert the particular Order ID within the URI template:

http://www.reallygoodassessments.com/AssessmentReport/1234

If you compare the BOD example to the REST example, there are a few things that drop out. For example . There’s on-going discussion about service descriptions for RESTful services. Web Application Description Language (WADL) is one format proposed for such descriptions. WADL is intended as a service contract, much like WSDL for WS-* stack web services. It occurs to me that conditions governing a GET, such as the above-referenced “unique indicator” and “max items,” might be the things you’d specify in a WADL or that might otherwise be relegated to interface documentation or trading partner agreement.

Any Parallels?

Are there any patterns in common between the BOD and RESTful approaches that could be leveraged in providing BOD implementers a path (no geek pun intended) to RESTful web services? I think there are. Consider the “BOD Mechanics” deck that I’ve referenced a few times. If you gave a group of REST-knowledgable architects the set of definitions that appear beginning on page 45 for data management using BODs, I’d guess most would find the raw material they’d need to derive a resource architecture and associated RESTful API.

One thing I find interesting is the correlation in purpose of the URI template within REST and the expression used within an OAGIS verb. Basically, each is setting the scope of what part of a business object or resource will be evaluated or considered in applying an action. REST uses an URI. The BOD uses an expression such as XPath. I have to imagine this similarity in purpose and structure could be useful in managing RESTful and BOD-based interfaces in parallel or in migrating a service from one to the other style of interface. The other quality of OAGIS BOD architecture that strikes me as reasonably parallel (versus perfectly parrallel) is the considerable restraint and discipline the OAGi community has used in avoiding the proliferation of verbs and in avoiding verbs that are overloaded with complex business semantics. OAGIS verbs are course-grain verbs. While OAGIS verbs include some business semantics that go beyond the RESTful HTTP verb set, I’d think you’d find that many OAGIS implementers use a relatively small subset of the OAGIS verbs and would be able to do the necessary mapping to HTTP verbs.

I expect that this is a topic HR-XML and other groups using the OAGIS BOD architecture will begin to explore in earnest next year (I think HR-XML has enough on its plate this year!). Based on my observations and correspondence with architects with some of HR-XML’s peer standards organizations, I expect in the not so distant future, you’ll see more vertical business standards groups looking at supporting RESTful variations of their standards.

Calling all recruiters, HR and those working within in the UK Online Recruitment Industry. At the Onrec.com Conference (Tuesday 3rd June 2008 - Westminster, London
), delegates will hear presentations on the following topics:

• Developing your recruitment site in order to increase recruitment traffic and build your own talent pool
• How to effectively use social networking sites as a recruitment tool
• How to minimize your organizations recruiting costs and get maximum return from your staffing budgets
• Screening candidates effectively and efficiently
• How to utilize new Virtual World sites, such as Second Life, as part of your recruitment strategy
• How to engage the best candidates so they choose your organization over your competitors

Tickets are only £395 and include access to the full conference programme, opportunities to network with the Speakers, plus exhibitors and other delegates. Ticket also includes refreshments, hot sit down lunch and networking drinks reception after the event. This is the only UK event to offer you the opportunity to learn how you could be saving money and recruiting more efficiently by using the latest online recruitment technologies.

Don’t miss the biggest and best online recruiting event of the Year. For more information, call Wendy Finch +44 0870 766 8530 or visit http://www.onrec.com/june.