This week passed was a quite surprising week in standards with a proposed scale down of the budgets for data.gov and other sites, yet another cloud standards body launched, plus other interesting views and news from the world of standards. Please feel free to leave any comments/suggestions in the comment section below.
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Welcome to the second in the new incarnation of the “Week in standards” series. I am always surprised by how much activity there is in the standards world in only a week, and this week is no exception. So here we go. Again, the goal is to provide as broad a review as possible, and please feel free to leave any feedback/suggestions in the comments section below.
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Welcome to the revised, new look, week in standards. Once again we will cover the latest developments in the world of standards each week, trying to keep the ideas as concise as possible so as to cover as many developments as possible. It is indeed surprising how quickly standards can evolve in just a week and we look forward to engaging with you and welcome your feedback.
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On wednesday February 23, Talkstandards.com held an online open forum to discuss a number of issues related to recent EU policy developments, building upon our December 22nd mini-event “European Interoperability Strategy“. Two communications released late last year by the European Commission related to e-Government and standardization – the European Interoperability Framework version 2 and updated Guidelines for the assessment of horizontal cooperation agreements – were central to the discussion, particularly the inclusion of FRAND licensing within the EIF specification of a open standard.
The pragmatism with respect to standardization reflected in the EIS and EIFv2 will be an important attribute to these policies in the coming years as governments increasingly grapple with a trend that enterprise CIOs are currently working thru (and have a clear head start on). As I’ve participated in debates with various governments around the world on the need for standardization strategies to help the government as purchaser of technology achieve better interoperability in eGovernment systems, I’ve often seen conversations begin with an “inward” facing focus. The direction of the conversation is often related to aligning internal government systems with other internal government systems and ensuring that a coherent list of standards is in place to guide that internal alignment. I have often noted that this approach falls short in that it only considers half of the equation and, importantly, it leaves the citizen out in the dark. We have to ask, how do citizens plan to connect and communicate with their government?
This article is co-authored by Susannah Sheppard, Consultant, and Richard Kemp, Senior and Commercial Technology Partner of Kemp Little LLP.
This comment highlights several of the issues we raised in a recently published article that discusses the recently released EIF v2, located at http://www.kemplittle.com/html/stay-posted/publications/short-lines/the-new-european-interoperability-framework.html?SESSIONFRONT=52d1177702a3926ecb525037e483b78a
A number of questions were posed for the upcoming TalkStandards event. This contribution is responsive to the following question:
The EIF v2 sets out attributes of “open specification” as well as a comment which appears to give public administrations some discretion to reference specifications that do not meet these openness criteria “if open specifications do not exist or do not meet functional interoperability needs.”(Section 5.2.1) How does this differ from the language in EIF v1 and what are the practical implications of this difference in language?
Sharing standards and achieving greater interoperability between different technology platforms has no doubt helped drive a new level of dynamism and innovation in technological development, and supported efforts toward greater efficiency in public services. In Europe, such cooperation is one more step to foster the internal market.
In what follows I try to respond to two forum questions posed by the convenor;
Question 1: From Objectives to Action: The EIFv2 and EIS provide normative guidance on what needs to be done to foster interoperability, particularly across the semantic and organizational layers. But how can Member State governments meet these objectives in practice?
Question 2: The implications of Open Specifications; The EIF v2 sets out attributes of “open specification” as well as a comment which appears to give public administrations some discretion to reference specifications that do not meet these openness criteria “if open specifications do not exist or do not meet functional interoperability needs.”( Section 5.2.1) How does this differ from the language in EIF v1 and what are the practical implications of this difference in language?
This article is co-authored by James Bryce Clark, General Counsel, and Laurent Liscia, Executive Director, of OASIS
Professor Ganslandt and several previous TalkStandards Forums describe the steady rain of updated policy guidelines on interoperability, standards and competition law that have fallen from the European Commission sky, over the past year. As the sky clears a bit, it is a good time to look out form under our umbrellas, start assessing the path ahead, and plot out our pathways around the puddles. Likely there still will be more clouds and rain on the horizon. But several major themes have emerged, and can be seen more clearly as the bruine politique clears up, or at least abates for a few months:
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