Re: [egov] Future of eGov TC

[creed@opengeospatial.org]

A bit more on GEOSS (http://www.epa.gov/geoss/). In February 2005, 61
countries agreed to GEOSS plan and vision. Since them the number of
participating countries has nearly doubled. Over the last 18 months, there
has been a series of highly sucessful GEOSS interoperability
demonstrations that utilized a variety of international standards.
(http://www.ogcnetwork.net/GEOSSdemos).

Regards

Carl



> Hi Peter
>
> What you are proposing is very much along the lines of the architecture
> adopted for the Global Earth Observations System of Systems (GEOSS). I
> attach here a two-pager with some relevant excerpts about the GEOSS
> architecture in case you may be interested. (This actually follows much
> the same architectural principles we agreed a couple years ago in the eGov
> TC--What goes around comes around!)
>
> Eliot
>
> At 10:35 AM 12/12/2006, Peter F Brown wrote:
>>Dear all:
>>
>>I had interesting discussions with both Patrick Gannon and Carol
>> Cosgrove-Sacks of OASIS at the Adoption Forum in London the other week.
>> In the course of our talks, the issue of the future of the eGov TC arose
>> once again.
>>
>>I expressed my view that the TC will only work on the basis of organic
>> rather than synthetic developments: in other words: if we attempt to
>> create a piece of work for the sake of demonstrating the usefulness of
>> the committee - say "let's build an eGov upper-level ontology" then I
>> believe we are less likely to succeed than if we identify a current gap
>> in eGov work that the TC might be able to fill and then see what that
>> translates into in terms of practical work.
>>
>>In an attempt to do just that, I would like to put to the TC a very first
>> sketch of some work that I started on within the Austrian government and
>> then with the European standards agency, CEN (whose 'eGov Focus Group' I
>> nominally chair) but which hasn't got off the ground because of a
>> contractual issue with the European Commission.
>>
>>The initiative was entitled "eGovernment Resources Network" and attempted
>> to build a model with which public agencies could develop resources
>> sharing capabilities - whether those resources be data models,
>> requirements studies or full-blown eServices - on the backbone of a
>> standards-based framework. An introduction to the issue can be found at
>> www.pensive.eu/uid/0101 and a draft discussion paper at
>> www.pensive.eu/uid/0079.
>>
>>In the paper, a number of recommendations are put forward including the
>> need for an eGovernment Information Model - with which any resources made
>> available for sharing with others can be labelled and described in a
>> standard fashion à la SOA - and a Collaboration Framework Model -
>> identifying and possibly defining some methods and protocols that could
>> be deployed to identify, access, share and possibly orchestrate available
>> resources by other public authorities.
>>
>>These issues have aroused a lot of interest within the European Union but
>> the European Commission has tended to want to protect and extend current
>> initiatives in this space but which tend towards, what I would consider a
>> somewhat dated "give me all your stuff and we'll publish it through a
>> portal" model rather than the "keep your own stuff but make it available
>> in a federated environment" model that I and others have advocated.
>>
>>Are others facing or addressing this or similar issues around federation
>> and re-use of (scarce and costly) public eGov resources?
>>
>>Would there be interest in discussing this further and taking these and
>> other recommendations through the TC? Spawning creation of a specific TC
>> to do this, as per the TC's charter? or any other approach?
>>
>>As I've stated before, I'm not in favour of artificial respiration and
>> reanimation of a dead body but would be prepared to apply some
>> defibrillation to establish a regular pulse of activity if there are
>> signs of life...
>>
>>Best regards,
>>
>>Peter
>>
>>-------------
>>Peter F Brown
>>Chair, CEN eGovernment Focus Group
>>Founder, Pensive.eu
>>www.pensive.eu
>>Co-Editor, OASIS SOA Reference Model
>>Lecturer at XML Summer School
>>---
>>Personal:
>>+43 676 610 0250
>>http://public.xdi.org/=Peter.Brown
>>www.XMLbyStealth.net
>>www.xmlsummerschool.com
>