At least SOA, web 2.0 and SaaS? are inseparable, according to Microsoft's Michael Platt?,

• Network and devices as a platform
• Data consumption and remixing from all sources including user generated data
• Continuous update
• Rich and interactive UI
• Architecture of participation

In an SOA, also according to Platt, the user acts as a foundation but not the center: "Saying that the user is the most important component is not the same as saying that everything revolves around the user. Thinking of this architecture as having a focal point inevitably leads you to misunderstand it. It is more akin to an eternal circle - an endless loop - in which providers interact with consumers who in turn become providers. Every endpoint is also a starting point." Sadly this remains quite typical of the way SOA is presently described, leading some to believe Microsoft wants to derail it using embrace/extend/destroy?. However there are dialectics or gradient?s that tend to make the standards both more complex and more adaptive than they were initially thought to be:

• gradients of trust/control? vary, e.g. from a full PKI to simple standards accomodating anonymous trolls to wide open cesspool?s
• degrees of standardization? vary also
• monetization? varies, with enterprise? applications requiring business case?s while nonprofit? uses, e.g. political wikis, can delay this or rely on donor?s
• rate of change? which can be accomodated in tightly controlled small private organizations is very fast, while the public web can change only very slowly, with large organizations in between
• core/gap/edge? tensegrity leans quite differently based on organizational cultures.

"Enterprise architectures tend to stand at the controlled, well-defined ends of these gradients, Web 2.0 in its present-day form stands at the opposite ends, which means that it often seems chaotic and fuzzy. But the gradients form a continuum, and some of the chaotic/fuzzy stuff has a valuable role to play in the enterprise, while Web 2.0 could do with a bit more definition and order." Probably no one set of balances is ideal for all organizations or purposes, and thsoe ideal for one perspective may not be from another, e.g. Election Markup Language.

content first, data rules

What's widely agreed is that data rules?: that "content and context is the lifeblood of the architecture — what brings it to life. Therefore the architecture has an obligation to provide a framework for relationship?s and to manage information flow?s. That is partly a technical requirement, providing mechanisms for messaging, quality of service?, versioning?, identity, information? security and so on. At a higher level, it must also provide participants with structures for community? and discovery?, e.g. rendezvous? and findability. Poorly explored problems include network effects?, mediation? - implicit in the architecture - and software as service problems such as on-demand application?, e.g. the SaaS? model used by Salesforce.com?, Rearden Commerce?, StrikeIron?, in which code customization? versus declarative configuration? in multi-tenant architecture is the major problem.

benefits?

There are several competing perspectives on what it means, and what it changes. [|The benefits] of SOA, some of which seem almost fictional?, include at least:

• Empowering the software architect to make major decisions and have them reliably implemented across an entire enterprise - enforcing an ontology to make at least a reflective intranet possible.
• Governing those decisions using the organization's power structure not a series of technical accidents
• Permitting Microsoft, via Microsoft Spark? and related efforts, to better integrated shared source? and open source, e.g. the XFire? open source stack for SOAP? which meets WS-Security? standards from OASIS
• Providing a menu of ways to coordinate services that can be implemented one step at a time, by loosely coupled means.

Grand visions abound. Some http://news.com.com/Game+designers+aim+for+Nobel+Peace+Prize/2100-1043_3-6052353.html?tag=nefd.lede game designers believe firmly that video game?s can win them the Nobel Peace Prize. Why not?

• until 3.1
  • too many terms
• too broad a path: enterprise versus public web views
  • content first, data rules
  • benefits?
• loose coupling, agile computing
  • inter-service coupling
    • inter-service abusive coupling
  • web 1.0
  • industry standards
  • open politics web
    • EML
  • Living Ontology Web
• standards efforts
• what it does
• progress

Those promoting an SOA vision of web 2.0 assert that web services will become more closely integrated and laterally related, resulting in "loose coupling: After design time and runtime comes change time, the most important stage of the lifecycle in a service-oriented architecture. Services have to operate in the real world, where nothing can be taken for granted and nothing is set in stone. That's why they have to be loosely coupled. Change is inevitable, and sooner or later — usually sooner, of course — services need modification to adapt to new requirements (what I called "the uh-oh moment" in a previous blog posting on this topic). The lifecycle of a service is a continuous loop of build-test-deploy-redesign?." - infravio internal paper

inter-service coupling

Jeff Schneider? proposes an inter-service coupling index?. Schneider separately defines intermediary decoupling?, standards coupling?, granularity coupling?, contract coupling? and abusive coupling?, less of which is good, thus a lower score = more loosely coupled.

The ECG proposes specific ways to optimize loosely coupled associations using a distrust metric? and many conventions to reduce distrust, e.g. ECG_naming_conventions: standardizing all control verbs as REST advises, and relying on GFDL corpus namespace for nouns. The Living Ontology Web would express the minimum subset of these, the next open politics web would tend to include more each time. Today's open politics web employs some issue/position/argument and commitment language in common among services studying open politics itself. See below for more on these projects.

inter-service abusive coupling

By focusing on politics itself, ECG deals with the origins of abusive coupling? directly: more chatty conversation?s, fatty message?s, time bound conversation?s, interface fragility? - particularly during campaigns - fixed invocation model?s all have both technical and parallel political meanings.

web 1.0

Including P2P? is considered critical by Schneider, who claims that existing "web services are an example of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)" already, and support:

• consumers of services,
• providers of services,
• and registrars of services

"These three entities work in concert to provide a loosely coupled computing paradigm. The manifestation of this paradigm is through standards, most notably XML?, SOAP?, UDDI? and WSDL?. These standards offer the three parties (consumer, provider and registrar) a common language to communicate. Most industry analysts would point out that these technologies offer no real innovation. The industry is excited about the fact that competitors have set aside their differences and agreed on a universal approach to communicating. This new opportunity for business integration has made it attractive for the enterprise to move forward with Web service initiatives."

"Perhaps the first wave of Web services is simply building a front end to legacy systems with XML-RPC? mechanisms such as SOAP. This means that instead of exposing proprietary APIs from applications such as SAP, we provide an open abstraction layer. This layer facilitates the translation of requests between systems. In essence, corporations are asking that their systems begin speaking the same interfacing language via the mechanisms that have collectively manifested themselves as "Web services." The use of a single interfacing language reduces engineering costs and decreases the amount of time to deploy business-to-business systems. Additional hurdles include defining more advanced "business grammar?s" and waiting for the widespread adoption of the grammars that exist today."

From this perspective, REST works because it simplifies the grammar, and limits those languages.

industry standards

Each industry however must match its own terminology to the build-test-deploy-redesign? feedback loop of its now-common signal infrastructure and that single interfacing language by which business processes are defined with a common underlying business grammar?.

This is the primary concern of BACnet and OASIS which are private consortium? efforts concerned with opening private opportunities for service provider?s to create common facility management? and semantic web standards respectively. Infravio? for instance offers a range of services for enterprise integration?.

To extend loose coupling deeper, an SOA further assumes that common ontology standards, "agile computing" and URI axioms combine to reliably knit multiple service providers? into a single reliable service seen by the customer. This is the primary concern of ECG, W3?, IETF and most government agencies, which see themselves as creating reliable instructional capital or "middleware" which can support a wide range of applications and standards without favouring any, and maintaining some basic quality of service? guarantees.

open politics web

The open politics web, for instance, is a very specialized semantic web that makes it simpler to knit many open politics argument structures from various public, semi-public, and private sources together into reliable unified TIPAESAs that do not favour any one authority on which positions to pursue. It further integrates position statements from leadership candidates from each major political party, and the party platform used in elections, in a single schema of all issues that reduce rhetoric? from each party, mass media?, or even voters biases.

EML

It also provides an alternative to vendor-run efforts for vital public information. ECG has been critical of OASIS efforts like Election Markup Language for having a focus on cash savings? not on regret?s arising from corrupt election?s or systemic biases of service provider?s.

Living Ontology Web

The next open politics web, expected to be based on living ontology supports an advanced ideal of service-oriented architecture that results in an ultra-reflexive intranet and pure service economy model with full cost accounting in the long term. The interim step between these, reflexive intranet supporting all control verbs with Better URI Axioms, is called the Living Ontology Web, of which openpolitics.ca itself is one prototype, and which is sometimes referred to generically as a sociosemantic web.

This should heighten the scrutiny on election protocols in both political party and election regulator?s, and result in a much more robust and exact interface between e-democracy and e-government. This in turn will likely influence UN and other agencies.