Resources
Cross Agency Collaboration In Focus
- Wiki Pages Serve FEA Goals
- The CIOCs Architecture and Infrastructure Committee and Collaborative Expedition Workshops
- The Geospatial Community of Practices Expedition Workshop #39
- Chief Architects Forum
- Data Reference Model Public Forum
- Ontolog and and SICoP
Wiki Pages Serve FEA Goals
Based on open source and open standards principles, the Wiki Home Page provides an environment for dynamic read-and-write information sharing that supports the same federated collaboration model as CORE.gov.
Although not exclusive to government workers, Wiki pages have facilitated organizations under OMB's Chief Information Officers Council (CIOC). The CIO is a principal interagency forum to help federal CIOs develop IT solutions that are more results-oriented, efficient, and citizen-centered. Wiki pages enable trusted teams to develop workshops, conference-call discussions, documentation, file sharing, and mailing lists that advance FEA interagency interoperability and reuse objectives.
The CIOC's Architecture and Infrastructure Committee and Collaborative Expedition Workshops
The CIOC's Architecture and Infrastructure Committee (AIC) sponsors more than 30 Collaborative Expedition Workshops on Wiki pages to advance FEA objectives to provide direction on business process and IT investment management improvement. "Expedition" refers to the search for those agile business components that often emerge among small businesses, but are not easily discovered by E-government managers.
The Geospatial Community of Practices Expedition Workshop #39
As an example Expedition Workshop, The Geospatial Community of Practices Expedition Workshop #39 explores how emerging standards-based protocols (RDF, OWL, and Topic Maps) can improve collaboration around problem-centered, intergovernmental scenarios that support needed interoperability. In March 2005, this group held a workshop at the National Science Foundation (NSF) called "Toward a National Unified Geospatial Enterprise Architecture: Seeing the Way Forward Together."
Chief Architects Forum
The AIC's Chief Architects Forum (CAF), which serves as a formal mechanism for the voice of the federal chief architect community, is sponsoring the development of the FY 2006 Enterprise Architecture Data Dictionary and Glossary of Terms for the OMB, to be finalized in May of this year. Also see CAF's Wiki page.
Data Reference Model Public Forum
The AIC also sponsors the Data Reference Model (DRM) Public Forum where federal architects and stakeholders are developing a strategy for a mature FEA DRM, an effort led by Michael Daconta, DHS Metadata Program Manager. Susan Turnbull (susan.turnbull@gsa.gov) is the AIC representative. Read more about the DRM development in our Data Architecture In Focus.
Ontolog and SICoP
Ontolog is another active, open community of practice on Wiki pages that aims to develop a universal business language (UBL) and identify ontological engineering approaches to apply to the broader domain of eBusiness standardization efforts, among other objectives. This group holds weekly conference calls on related issues with assigned presenters from many agencies. For example, Dr. Mark Greaves from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will present "The Future of Semantic Web Technology at DARPA" on Thursday, May 12, 2005.
Complementing Ontolog, the Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP) created the Ontology and Taxonomy Coordinating Working Group (ONTAC WG) in April 2005 to develop knowledge classification and representation systems, such as ontologies, taxonomies, thesauri, and graphical knowledge representations as related to government activities.
To find out more about In Focus items and suggest other In Focus items, contact us.
