Open Standards: Principles and Organizations
Date: Dec 23, 2004
This is the second of two articles in which we look at the opportunities presented by open standards for the technology community, corporations, and software vendors and suppliers. Open standards provide an approach in which everyone can benefit; new technologies allow for flexibility and choice.
Why Do We Need Open Standards?
For more than fifty years, the information technology (IT) industry has been a catalyst for global growth and opportunity. The dynamic effects on all types of industries, commerce, and throughout society have been astonishing. The global market for all IT products surpassed $1 trillion in 2002 and continues with projections to $1.4 trillion by 2005, despite economic uncertainty. The IT industry has generated millions of highly skilled workers worldwide who are paid above-average salaries and are able to contribute to better standards of living and stable societies. Millions of jobs have been created in related industries such as services, support, and training. In the United States, for example, nearly 11 million people are employed in IT. Nearly 14,000 IT companies employ 50 or more employees. The United States is the world leader in IT, representing more than 45% of global IT spending.
The IT industry can be classified as a transformation technology because it affects economic and social systems dramatically. IT is frequently compared to earlier transformative technologies such as electricity, the telephone, or the automobile. Analysis of enterprise growth and productivity over the last fifty years has shown accelerated development of almost every industry employing IT products and services. From its earliest beginnings—after World War II, when a small group of newly formed computer companies targeted large enterprises with big, expensive mainframes—to today's standard, where millions of cheap and powerful desktop computers work for profit and sophisticated software is universal, IT has brought about monumental changes in all categories of commerce and industry. Add to this scenario the superglue called the Internet, which ties hundreds of millions of these computers and their associated networks and corporations together, allowing information, transactions, and ultimately revenue to flow across global borders 24 hours a day.
Despite these achievements, however, we could be approaching the limits of IT growth. Now we need new triggers to success, such as open standards.
Principles of Open Standards
Open standards mold themselves to the evolving needs of consensus-based customers. Currently, many organizations consider the following concepts to constitute the major principles of open standards:
Openness. All stakeholders can participate in the standards-development process.
Consensus. All interests are discussed and agreement found; no interest group dominates.
Due process. Balloting and an appeals process can be used to find resolution.
Open IPR. Holders of intellectual property rights (IPR) must identify themselves during the standards-development process.
Open world. Same standard for the same function worldwide, used by all.
Open access. Anyone can access the standard and comment, criticize, or make suggestions on committee documents, drafts, and completed standards.
Open meetings. Anyone can participate in standards-development meetings.
Ongoing support. Standards are supported until user interest ceases, rather than when provider interest declines.
Open interfaces. Interfaces allow additional functions, whether public or proprietary.
Open use. IPR is necessary to implement an accredited standard.
Note the heavy emphasis on open and access in almost all of these categories.
In summary, the major benefits of open standards include the following:
Compatibility of software, networks, and applications among multiple vendors.
Affordable software for individuals, enterprise, and governments.
Universal access through mass software rollout without costly licensing implications.
Access to data without barrier of proprietary software and data formats.
Ability to customize software to local languages and cultures.
Lowered barriers to entry for software businesses.
Participation in global network of software development.
Open standards is an especially useful tool to allow developing countries to leapfrog into the information age. It encourages novel development models that have been demonstrated to be particularly well-suited to take advantage of the work of developers collaborating across the Internet. In general, it also has a positive impact as an enabler for the creation of new markets, business opportunities, and innovation.
Open Standards Organizations
The following sections briefly review some of the standards organizations and their open standards that are currently being developed, discussed, or implemented. This is just a sample of the main standards organizations and the important work that they're doing. Many governments are now developing national policies to promote the use of open standards—examples include China, Thailand, Brazil, Argentina, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. It's up to the United States to continue to lead this initiative into the future.
NOTE
Many of these brief descriptions are drawn from the sites of the organizations. Links are provided for further information.
Distributed Management Task Force, Inc.
The Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTF) is the industry organization that is leading the development, adoption, and unification of management standards and initiatives for desktop, enterprise, and Internet environments.
The Common Information Model (CIM) is the DMTF's standardized model for describing overall management information in a network/enterprise environment. CIM is composed of a specification, which defines the details for integration with other management models; and a schema, which provides the actual model descriptions.
Internet Engineering Task Force
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet.
The IETF's Policy Core Information Model (RFC 3060) is the open standard that presents the object-oriented information model for representing policy information developed jointly in the IETF Policy Framework workgroup and as extensions to CIM activity in the DMTF. This model defines two hierarchies of object classes: structural classes, representing policy information and control of policies; and association classes, which indicate how instances of the structural classes are related to each other.
The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an application-layer protocol that facilitates the exchange of management information between network devices. It's part of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite. SNMP enables network administrators to manage network performance, find and solve network problems, and plan for network growth.
Two versions of SNMP exist: SNMP version 1 (SNMPv1) and SNMP version 2 (SNMPv2). Both versions have a number of features in common, but SNMPv2 offers enhancements, such as additional protocol operations.
Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards
The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) is a not-for-profit global consortium that drives the development, convergence, and adoption of e-business standards. Members themselves set the OASIS technical agenda, using a lightweight, open process expressly designed to promote industry consensus and unite disparate efforts.
OASIS produces worldwide standards for security, web services, XML conformance, business transactions, electronic publishing, topic maps, and interoperability within and between marketplaces.
Web Services Security (WSS) describes enhancements to SOAP messaging in order to provide quality of protection through message integrity and single-message authentication. These mechanisms can be used to accommodate a wide variety of security models and encryption technologies.
Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) is a standard way of using web services architecture and technology to manage distributed resources.
Java Community Process
The Java Community Process is an open organization of international Java developers and licensees whose charter is to develop and revise Java technology specifications, reference implementations, and technology compatibility kits.
The Java Management Extensions (JSR 3, JMX) open specification will provide a management architecture, APIs, and services for building web-based, distributed, dynamic, and modular solutions to manage Java-enabled resources. JMX technology provides tools for building distributed, web-based, modular, and dynamic solutions for managing and monitoring devices, applications, and service-driven networks.
The Logging API Specification (JSR 47) is a specification for logging APIs within the Java platform. These APIs will be suitable for logging events from within the Java platform and from within Java applications.
The Java Agent Services (JSR 87) are a set of objects and service interfaces to support the deployment and operation of autonomous communicative agents. The specification is based on the Abstract Architecture developed by the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA). This Abstract Architecture defines how agents can register and discover each other, and how agents interact by exchanging intentional messages that are grounded in speech-act theory and first-order predicate logic.
The Portlet Specification (JSR 168), to enable interoperability between portlets and portals, will define a set of APIs for portal computing, addressing the areas of aggregation, personalization, presentation, and security.
Storage Networking Industry Association
The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is a registered standards and nonprofit trade association dedicated to ensuring that storage networks become complete and trusted solutions across the IT community.
The Bluefin Specification will allow IT managers to connect multiple vendors' products into a storage area network (SAN) and manage them all with a common set of tools. HP and IBM continue to support Bluefin in SNIA, most recently participating in a breakthrough demonstration of heterogeneous SAN management using Bluefin technology.
Global Grid Forum
Global Grid Forum (GGF) is a community-initiated forum of more than 5,000 individual researchers and practitioners working on distributed computing (grid) technologies. GGF's primary objective is to promote and support the development, deployment, and implementation of grid technologies and applications via the creation and documentation of "best practices"—technical specifications, user experiences, and implementation guidelines.
Grid technologies provide the foundation for a number of large-scale efforts utilizing the global Internet to build distributed computing and communications infrastructures. As common grid services and interoperable components emerge, the difficulty in undertaking these large-scale efforts will be greatly reduced and, as importantly, the resulting systems will better support interoperation.
Open Grid Services Architecture
Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) is a grid-computing initiative. The purpose of the OGSA Working Group is to achieve an integrated approach to future OGSA service development via the documentation of requirements, functionalities, priorities, and interrelationships for OGSA services. The output of this group will be an OGSA architecture roadmap document that defines, scopes, and outlines requirements for key services.
Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) is another important grid-related initiative. The objective of the OGSI Working Group is to review and refine the OGSI specification and other documents that derive from this specification, including OGSA infrastructure–related technical specifications and supporting informational documents. In this specification, an attempt is made to define the minimal, integrated set of extensions and interfaces necessary to support definition of the services that will compose OGSA.
The Open Group
The Open Group is a non-profit consortium focusing on best practices and process-based XML content for e-business and application integration.
Open Applications Group
The mission of the Open Applications Group is to define and encourage the adoption of a unifying standard for e-business and application software interoperability that reduces customer cost and time to deploy solutions.
Summary and Final Thoughts
The adoption of open standards and vendor-neutral applications is crucial for unleashing power, speed, and innovation in the future economy, and interest in open standards development is gaining ground among leading vendors. Open standards have the potential of restructuring the software industry.
Open standards have almost reached a critical mass in the mainstream world market, and their impact is becoming noticeable in the software industry and in society as a whole. Companies like IBM, SAP, Sun, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Silicon Graphics are committed to using open software as a core part of their business models and are investing significantly in enhancing its already impressive capabilities. The way ahead is to more open and unified systems. It makes good business sense. Simply put: Open standards convert technology into the universal world of business.