Monday, August 27, 2012

Progress with our Mobile, Cloud, JSON, REST, Big Data, NoSQL, Social Media (MCJRBNS) Working Group

Our Working Group continues to make excellent progress.  We reviewed a proposal from Abhijeet Ranadive of Cisco for a Technical Design guide. 

Abhijeet’s proposal included the following items:

URL Naming Convention
Query Parameter Decision
Exception Handling
HTTP Code
Process Exception (ConfirmBOD?)
Authentication
Partial Response / Pagination
Content Negotiation [XML vs JSON]
Versioning

Kurt Kanaskie from Merck will work with Abhijeet to build the first draft and bring it back to the Working Group.

The Working Group also discussed the requirement for round tripping from XML to JSON and back.  They have found a couple of tools and will continue to evaluate them.

There were several other topics discussed as well and action items were developed to address each one.  This Working Group is getting terrific participation.

We are also working on a White Paper which we plan to release the Wednesday after the US Labor Day holiday. 

The team meetings every other Thursday at 4 PM EDT.

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Chem eStandards Release 5.2 is now available

OAGi is pleased to announce that Chem eStandards Release 5.2 is now available.

Most of the changes in this release were made as a result of requests from our partner Association, AgGateway, who is also a member of the OAGi Chemical Industry Council. A summary of the changes and additions made in this release is just below.

  • Added the following code list values to cidxListPriceType: FOBOriginPrice and FOBDestinationPrice
  • Added the following code list value to cidxListReferenceType: TransferNumber
  • Added the following code list value to cidxListPartnerRoles: Reporter
  • Changed ProductInformation/PackagingInformation maximum occurrence from one to unbounded
  • Added IndustrySegment element as a child element of PriceSheetProperties and PriceSheetLineItem. The occurrence is optional and unbounded. The allowable values are AgChem, Chem, Energy, Feed, Fertilizer, Grain, Paper, and Seed.
  • Added integer element SeedCountPerPound as a child of ProductSubLineItem. The occurrence is optional and unbounded.
  • Added element LotQuantity to ProductSubLineItem. It is optional and may occur up to one time.

This new version of Chem eStandards can be downloaded on the OAGi website here.  Please remember that you must log in to download the standards.

I invite you to join me in thanking everyone who made this release possible.  

Thursday, August 16, 2012

OAGi News for August 2012

Hi and welcome to news for OAGi for August 2012. For regular updates of activities and happenings, you can follow us on Facebook here.  You can also find us on LinkedIn here, and Twitter here.  We ask our members and friends to “like” and follow us.

Remember, if you are not yet a member of OAGi you can review the all of the benefits of OAGi membership
here.

Open O&M Group re-convened last week

Members of the Open O&M (Open Operations and Maintenance) Group re-convened last week in Raleigh, North Carolina.  Open O&M is a group of several standards groups working together to share ideas, associated technologies, and to collaborate whenever possible.

The meeting was used to catch up on all of our initiatives and explore ways to collaborate.  The MESA group builds a standard that uses the OAGIS Platform and we discussed ways to make better use of the upcoming Release 10 platform.

Mimosa and MESA introduced a new specification they are building to provide a common middleware API.  The purpose of the specification is to provide end users with a single interface regardless of the product they are using, for example, WebSphere, BizTalk, etc.
Some of our readers may not remember that OAGi published a common middleware API called OAMAS (Open Applications Group Middleware API Specification) in 1997.  The OAGi Policy Board voted to discontinue that effort several years later to focus on the content.

This new specification is planned to be released next year.  One more exciting thing about the new specification is that is uses the OAGIS protocol (BOD, Verb, Noun) as the format for the calls to the API.  You will hear more on this moving forward so we invite you to stay tuned.

Chem eStandards Release 5.2 Ships Monday, August 20, 2012

Release 5.2 of the Chem eStandards (i.e., Ag eStandards ) Release 5.2 public review period has completed and the Architecture Council and the OAGi Policy Board have voted to approve the final shipment.  The changes to the standard were requested by several companies within AgGateway, who is a member of the OAGi Chemical Industry Council and a partner of OAGi.

Jim Wilson, our Chem eStandards Chief Architect, is finishing the packaging this week.  I encourage you to look for them next Monday on our web site here.


REMINDER – OAGi Plenary Meeting is scheduled for November 14 - 15

We invite you to save the dates of November 14 and 15, 2012 on your calendar for our upcoming Plenary and Working Group meetings hosted by Oracle at their headquarters in Redwood City, California.  The Plenary meeting will be on Wednesday, November 14 and we will have Working Group Meetings on Thursday, November 15.  The OAGi Policy Board will also meet on Tuesday, November 13.

We are planning two themes for the upcoming meeting.  The first is our Mobile Business and Cloud Computing initiative and the second theme is the beginning of the launch of OAGIS Release 10, (OAGIS X).  We are planning many exciting speakers and case studies.

Look for more announcements and information as we get nearer to the meetings.

Mobile, Cloud, JSON Initiative continues to make progress

Our Mobile, Cloud, and JSON Working Group continues to meet and make progress.  The most recent work has focused on using OAGIS within a REST framework, the most popular way to code API’s in the cloud and for mobile.

The team has put together and initial document on processing and will be build that out over time.  They have mapped the OAGIS Verbs to the REST Verbs as part of that process.  The think is that they may need augmented at some point but not right now.

The team has taken a decision that the highest form of content will be the OAGIS Noun and the lowest could be even at the Element level.  The componentization of the OAGIS architecture really lays a strong foundation for this new use of OAGIS.

None of this means we will be eliminating the BOD Messaging capability, we are augmenting it with the REST capability.

Remember it is the content that is important and the more ways we can use the content the more useful the common data model will be of users of OAGIS.

OAGIS Release 10 work continues with plans for first Public Review later this year

OAGIS Release Ten (OAGIS X) Working Groups continue to meet on a regular basis and we encourage your participation.  We can use all the smart people we can get!  The HR-XML mapping exercise has been completed and the only major remaining content work to complete is the Chem eStandards mapping and enhancements.

It is important that OAGIS X contains functional equivalence to the Chem eStandards because this was the agreement before the CIDX merger in 2008.

All OAGi members are invited to join any of these groups.  If you are interested in joining any of these Working Groups, please contact us here.

Meeting Calendar for 2012

OAGi has recently moved revised and republished it’s events calendar.  This calendar contains all Working Group, Council Meetings, and face to face meetings. 

We welcome all OAGi members and users to take advantage of this revised calendar.  You can access our calendar here.

Policy Board Meeting – Completed
April 24, 2012
NIST
Gaithersburg, Maryland
Plenary and Working Groups - Completed
April 25 - 26, 2012
NIST
Presentations are available here.

Policy Board Meeting Planned
November 13, 2012
Oracle
Redwood Shores, CA, USA
Plenary and Working Groups Completed
November 14 - 15, 2012
Oracle
Redwood Shores, CA, USA.

European Meeting
We are working determining these dates and will announce them as soon as possible.
TBD
TBD