Data Unbound

I'm looking forward to seeing how Christopher Dede, Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard University, plans to relate cyberinfrastructure to learning technologies at his talk Teaching and Learning via Cyberinfrastructure on Nov 7, 2006. Much of the cyberinfrastructure discussion I've seen has focused on the research implications of this new tech-infrastructure. Will Dede help us think about the learning implications? The abstract for the talk is:

The National Science Foundation is evolving an ambitious vision of cyberinfrastructure–the integration of computing, data, networks, digitally enabled sensors, observatories, and experimental facilities. As the nation begins to actualize this vision, novel, powerful capabilities are emerging for educational simulation, visualization, and real-time data collection. Through cyberinfrastructure, students in any location could conduct sophisticated inquiry activities across barriers of distance and time, customizing their learning portals and participating in virtual communities. Instructors could use sophisticated methods of assessment based on real-time collection of information about individual student performance. What are the implications of this initiative for practice and policy today?

This morning, several of my colleagues and I listened to Planning and Delivering Service-Oriented Architecture, presented by Marty Backer and Christopher De Rosa, both of UCSD. (See the accompanying Powerpoint slides. Audio is also available from the presentation page.) I will recommend this talk to my colleagues and managers — there is a lot there.

Here I want to record the questions I asked during the session and my summary of the answers given:

• Have you used SOA in the context of academic/scholarly applications or only for administrative apps? Answer: There is a new app for academic personnel, which will include scholarly works.
• Have you consciously applied what we learn from mashups and other Web 2.0 approaches to SOA? That is, more lightweight service invocations (REST instead of SOAP, for instance.) Answer: Yes, they have followed mashups fairly closely. Their system does support multiple protocols. They build an internal service component and then wrap them. SOAP/WSDL…very interested in REST….lots of scripting language usage on campus.
• What type of education/traiing efforts are you putting into place for UCSD developers AND managers? Answer: The slides gives some answers.

Just hot off the press: start Zotero Developer Documentation. Developers, start your engines!  (I've printed them out already and am already pondering how I'm supposed to add data from an external process without directly touching the zotero.sqlite file….)

new IT architecture books

Originally uploaded by Raymond Yee.

Today, after receiving my book order of Understanding Enterprise SOA and Semantics in Business Systems: The Savvy Managers Guide from amazon.com, I set out to start re-reading them in earnest. I'm looking to them to help shape my understanding of service-oriented architecture and the infrastructure we need to build for better data services on campus. There's lot of hype around SOA; I'm trying to distill some concrete actions I can recommend for my colleagues and me to take with respect to SOA. Furthermore, how can I explain this topic quickly and effectively to people throughout the organization, specifically for my context, which is higher education.

I often turn to Educause for a specifically higher ed take on information technology. Lately, I've started wondering how other universities are responding to all the talk and much hype around service oriented architectures. A good place to start is the Service-oriented Architecture section on the Educause website. I've printed out the slides from a talk on SOA by Jim Phelps of University of Wisconsin-Madison earlier this year. Has UW-Madison actually successfully implemented a SOA process?