XML Community of Practice

Meeting Notes

April 20, 2006

This meeting was conducted as an open town hall meeting at the Knowledge Management (KM) conference at the Reagan Building.

Since Web connectivity was unavailable in the meeting room, Owen Ambur displayed some screen shots of the ET.gov site, which are available at http://xml.gov/presentations/aic/et.htm Then he introduced Amin Hassam to explain the screen shots of i411's advanced, faceted search service pilot showing how components and specifications registered at ET.gov can be browsed and discovered via the facets of the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) Service Component Reference Model (SRM) and Technical Reference Model (TRM). Although time did not allow consideration of Amin’s full presentation, it is available at http://xml.gov/presentations/i411a/etgov.htm

Jonny Chambers briefly explained Microsoft’s Solution Sharing Network (SSN) program and how it might be used to support the rendition of government forms in InfoPath, Microsoft’s eForms client software application that is part of the Office Professional Suite. Many government agencies own enterprise licenses for the Office Professional Suite but do not realize they own licenses for all of their employees to use InfoPath, which enables users to create XML instance documents validating against any schema without having to know anything about XML. Jonny’s presentation is available at http://xml.gov/presentations/ms2/ssn.htm

Betsy Fanning outlined the plans and activities of AIIM’s Interoperable Enterprise Content Management (iECM) standards committee. She said it will be an interoperability reference model and will outline what agencies should be thinking about and starting to do to enable interoperability among their ECM applications. Her presentation is available at http://xml.gov/presentations/aiim/iecm.htm

John Fitzgerald provided a brief overview of Software AG’s native XML database, Tamino. Owen noted that at the XML 2005 conference one of the keynote speakers from IBM observed that storing XML documents in relational databases is tantamount to shredding them. He also noted that relational databases are best applied to data whose schema does not change very often, which may seldom be the case. By contrast, native XML databases do not require a schema and can intelligently store and query XML instance documents regardless of their schemas. Owen also commented that some folks have questioned the adoption of XML, but Software AG’s 700 customers are a testament to the fact that XML is being widely deployed. John’s presentation is available at http://xml.gov/presentations/softwareag3/tamino.htm

Ken Sall explained the thesaurus application that he and Ron Reck have developed, using Microsoft Excel and leveraging selected elements of the W3C’s Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS). Ken and Ron’s presentation is available at http://xml.gov/presentations/saic2/skosaurus.htm as well as in PDF format at http://xml.gov/presentations/saic2/skosaurusppt.pdf

Finally, Tyson Brooks provided a brief overview of the Enterprise Architecture Knowledge Digest (EAKD) the Association of Enterprise Architects (a|EA) plans to compile. His presentation is available at http://xml.gov/presentations/aea/eakd.htm

In addition to the HTML renditions, PPT renditions of the presentations are available at http://xml.gov/presentations.asp#20060420

Those who registered their presence at this meeting were:

Owen Ambur, Co-Chair, xmlCoP

Peter Boritz, XBLR-US

Tyson Brooks, BAE Systems

Jonny Chambers, Microsoft

Betsy Fanning, AIIM

John Fitzgerald, Software AG

Amin Hassam, i411

Sherry Hapel, Army

Omar Herren, Bureau of Prisons

Kim Koran, CSC

Bill Levis, Urban Institute

Meng Lin, DOT/FMCA

Alice Marshall, Presto Vivace

Ron Reck, SAIC

Kenneth Sall, SAIC

Paul J. Smith, Software AG

Allyson Ugarte, XBRL

Mark Yhart, Army

Teleconferencing was not supported for this meeting.

Alice Marshall’s summary of this meeting for her stakeholders is available at http://technoflak.blogspot.com/2006/04/xml-community-of-practice-notes-from.html

Please convey any additions or corrections to Owen_Ambur@ios.doi.gov