Interoperable Democracy: (#INDIVISIBLE) I just read Howard Schultz' open letter in the New York Times July 1 edition. This blog is about interoperability, and when you think about democracy, it is the ultimate standard for oppportunity and freedom. I applaud Howard's call for getting along, compromising, and getting this country back to a nation where all can work, and all can feel that the American Dream is still within the reach of those that do the work. 4th of July should give us all a few moments to figure out who in our political districts are pulling on the oars, who are sitting their doing nothing, and who are actively trying to disrupt progress. Demoncrat, Republican or Libertarian - we need to move anyone not working in our interests back into the private sector and out of being the people's representative. I too have been blessed from a life that started with some poverty, trauma, and strife. There have been some bumps along the way way, but only in America do I feel that I have had the latitude to make my own decisions, execute my own path, and receive the market driven benefits from those efforts. I'm sorry to see so many people not empbracing the work ethic required to make this happen, and I'm disappointed with the number of people that don't pay taxes. I'm aslo disappointed with the people at the top of the income ladder - they need to invest and lead versus take their winnnings off the table - both corporations and individuals are sitting on mountains of cash. We need leadership in both business and government that we're not getting. I applaud Bill Gates for starting Microsoft from scratch and reaping the benefits. I abhor executive compensation where major shareholder losses still result in multi-million dollar bonuses. If you need some great examples, look at our military and our olympic athletes - they epitomize striving without regard for the almighty dollar!

The importance of data standards in 2012

2012 promises to be a watershed of new technologies heading to maturity; particularly cloud computing. Larry Ellison was way of his time back in the late 90's in trumpeting the Web PC and the demise of the local PC with all of its associated issues and costs.

Like almost all revolutions, the cloud will be additive and help make all the rest work better, faster and longer. PCs will interact with phones and tablets, and an increasing number of automated sensors will be feeding cloud based applications across a wide range of functions.

Standardizing the data "bullets" will make the issue of whose platform and technology largely moot, and allow greater interoperability across partners, government, vendors, competitors and internationally. There are plenty of issues - security, scalability, resiliancy and total cost of ownership are going to be with us for a long time to come.

You've gotten a taste of how this can work with Twitter - for people to people transactions, keeping it to 140 charachters (though with links, people reference huge data sets including the library of congress) makes brevity a necessity.

Google has embraced CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) for their newly launched Public Alerting System - allowing for a wide range of alerts to be consolidated into one map. For the private sector security market, Pinkerton/Securitas has launched a product called Vigilance that is heavily embracing CAP as a means of integrating public, private, premium, open source, sensor, and internal data all into one interface.

It will take time, but this is a growing trend! Big data with no structure is tough to utilize. Big data with structure is far more searchable by mere mortals.

Interoperability and 2012

Lots of activity going on in the interoperability world:

OASIS and SITREP: I saw an amazing set of demonstration dashboards that showed the new Situation Report standard from OASIS Emergency Management Committee. Amazingly deep, the idea of multiple organizations being able to share detailed incident information transparently is a great vision.

NOAA nextgen: I don't know a lot about it, but I know NOAA always leads the field in terms of innovation in the federal government. Weather information very valuable to all.

CAP: Montreal summit on CAP, and a lot of work on future CAP concepts. Global adoption continues, and FEMA is rolling out IPAWS and CMAS systems finally.

HTML5: Promises major interoperability of web pages on all sorts of devices.

More to follow - the world is becoming a more standardized place!