Structured Methods

Bob Brauer writes: Acquisitions of companies such as Sun, BEA, Peoplesoft, Cognos, Siebel, Business Objects, and countless others the past few years have created a competition vacuum in the enterprise software space.

Interestingly, some of the Fortune 500 have annual I.T. budgets north of a billion dollars per year. And those that don't have budgets that are indeed quite large. This, combined with the fact that many of their primary systems were built and deployed in the 1990's (yes that's ten to twenty years ago) and are getting a bit "long in the tooth" as they say of aging horses, creates an interesting set of dynamics.

All of these trends point to a "perfect storm" of opportunity. Their alignment ought to be attractive to a new wave of entrepreneurs that can take advantage of the emerging Cloud Computing trend in new and exciting ways. This will enable a great deal of new innovation in the enterprise/corporate information technology space.

Loraine Lawson wrote: “The wonderful thing about standards is there are so many to choose from.” Fridsma knows the struggle of standards first-hand: He is overseeing the effort to sift through standards for electronic medical records as acting director of the Office of Interoperability and Standards in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. (It's important to note that this is not a standards body, but rather an open effort to sift through the existing standards to see what works and what doesn't.

Brad Feld wrote: As long time readers of this blog know, I’m strongly against software patents. Succinctly, I think they are (a) invalid constructs, (b) totally unnecessary, and (c) a massive tax on and retardant of innovation.

The film is based on a series of interviews conducted during the Supreme Court’s review of in re Bilski (which I attended in person) — a case that could have profound implications for the patenting of software. It’s really good and worth 29 minutes of your life.

Here is a list of tools to create SCORM packages, both open source and commercial. Moodle is a modular authoring tool for courses but at this time does not create SCORM packages.

Lorna Campbell wrote: Pinning down agreed definitions for Linked Data, linked data and linkable data is particularly problematic.As far as I can make out much of the debate boils down to whether Linked Data must adhere to the four principles outlined in Tim Berners Lee’s Linked Data Design Issues, and in particular whether use of RDF and SPARQL is mandatory. Some argue that RDF is integral to Linked Data, other suggest that while it may be desirable, use of RDF is optional rather than mandatory. Some reserve the capitalized term Linked Data for data that is based on RDF and SPARQL, preferring lower case “linked data”, or “linkable data”, for data that uses other technologies.