Open Standards Forum | Programme

Business and Organizational Change

Promoting e-Business and Web Services Standards to SMEs in Japan and Asia
Speaker: Kazunori Iwasa, Senior Engineer, Fujitsu Limited, Japan

The Japanese government is aim to promote B2B in SMEs. This motivates many industrial consortiums in Japan to develop and promote e-business infrastructure for SMEs. This presentation will describe the industry activities to promote B2B in SMEs, and conformance and interoperability testing activities to promote interoperability of Reliable Messaging.

SOA in Transformational Government
Speaker: Steve Jones, Head of SOA, Capgemini, United Kingdom

This presentation will describe how multiple government organisations are using the adoption of SOA as an agent of business change. Rather than viewing SOA as a technology exercise, these projects are using SOA as a business focused approach to understanding how Web Services and other standards-based technologies should be applied to deliver new opportunities and optimisations into government organisations. This presentation will cover examples from several countries and will help attendees understand how viewing SOA as a business tool delivers more effective technology solutions and business change than seeing SOA simply as a set of technology pieces.

Using ebXML, Messaging EDA and SOA to Implement an Interoperability Platform in a G2B Environment
Speaker: Ulf Persson, Director, Solutions Marketing, Axway Inc., United States

This session will focus on the challenges and benefits of implementing a complete Government to Business (G2B) portal using ebXML and web services in an event-driven architecture (EDA) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) environment.

Applications and Processes

Real World Uses of Transactional Web Services
Speaker: Ian Robinson, Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM, United Kingdom

This presentation will illustrate a number of real business scenarios in which IBM customers have successfully deployed applications that take advantage of Web service transactions. These scenarios include concerns such as transaction-affinity management in scalable, workload-managed environments, transactional failover in highly-available environments, and interoperability in heterogeneous runtime environments.

The concept of atomic transactions has played a cornerstone role in creating today’s enterprise application environments by providing guaranteed consistent outcome in complex multiparty business operations and a useful separation of concerns in applications. Rapid developments in Internet infrastructure and protocols have yielded a new type of application interoperation that makes concepts which could only previously be considered in an abstract form an implementation reality. The effects of such changes have been felt most strongly in business environments, fuelling the mindset for a transition from traditional atomic transactions to extended transaction models better suited for Internet interoperation. Most B2B applications require transactional support in order to guarantee consistent outcome and correct execution. These applications often involve long running computations, loosely coupled systems and components that do not share data, location, or administration and it is thus difficult to incorporate traditional ACID transactions within such architectures. This leads to the development of extended transaction models that allow the relaxation of some of the ACID properties in a controlled manner. The standard for Web services transactions is OASIS WS-TX. In this presentation, the speaker shall cover the evolution of the standard and the protocols it supports for both ACID and non-ACID transactions.

The WS-BPEL Standards Landscape for Business Processes
Speaker: Dieter Koenig, Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM, Germany

Business Processes not only play a key role in Business-to-Business (B2B) and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) scenarios by exposing the appropriate invocation and interaction patterns, but they are the fundamental basis for building heterogeneous and distributed applications (workflow-based applications). Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL or just BPEL) provides a model for describing the behavior of a business process based on stateful, long-running service interactions between the process and its partners. Business Processes specified via BPEL can be carried out by every BPEL compliant execution environment. WS-BPEL 2.0 was approved as an OASIS standard in April 2007. In addition, BPEL extensions have been proposed for processes with human interactions (BPEL4People, recently published), sub-processes with life-cycle coupling (BPEL-SPE), and Java integration (BPELJ). Finally, Service Component Architecture (SCA) provides an assembly model for services, which may be implemented as BPEL business processes. This presentation will give an overview of the BPEL language and shows how it can be used to compose Web services, provides an outlook on BPEL follow-on activities, and describes how BPEL and SCA complement each other.

Quality of Services: Security

This presentation is intended to provide an overview of the security standards developed at OASIS. It outlines the basic purposes and capabilities of WS-Security, SAML, WS-Federation, SAML, WS-SecureConversation, WS-Trust, WS-SecurityPolicy and related specifications and briefly describes how they relate to each other.

Can Sensitive SOA Communications be Supported Today by Standards-Based Technology?
Panelists: Martin Raepple, SAP AG; Paul Lipton, Sr. Architect, IP & Standards, CA Inc.; and a representative to be announced from Microsoft

Before committing to SOA for critical government IT projects, planners will need to be assured that the integrity, confidentiality, performance and reliability of messages passed between the parties concerned can be guaranteed. This panel of experts on the subject of SOA security and management will debate questions such as:

• How do security and management standards fit together and what is the impact on SOA governance?
• What are the key SOA standards and how do they fit together?
• Are SOA standards sufficiently mature to provide the necessary guarantees?
• Are the standards implemented within sufficient commercial products to provide an adequate choice of vendors?
• Is the interoperability between products from different vendors sufficient to enable trouble-free communications in a heterogeneous environment, as would be found in communications between governments or government departments?
• In what situations are the current standards inadequate and what needs to be done to resolve this?

The panel will also take questions from the floor, addressing specific areas of concern around security, management, and SOA.

Collaboration

eGov-Bus: Advanced eGovernment Information Service Bus
Speaker: Herbert Leitold, Site Manager, A-SIT, Secure Information Technology Center Austria, Austria

The findings of eGov-Bus, an EU funded international research project, will be presented. eGov-Bus supports cross-border eGovernment life-events based on orchestrating domestic Web services. Adaptable process management technologies, advanced Web service technologies, virtual repositories, electronic identities, and qualified signatures are among the basis of the technology. Discussed will be the numerous open standards involved (OASIS and beyond), such as BPQL, DSS, SAML, WS-Trust, WS-Security, XMLDSIG, XAdES, etc.

Europol / Eurojust Collaboration: Evaluating WS Security / WS Secure Conversation on Basis of a Real World Case Study
Speaker: Andreas Schaad, Senior Researcher, SAP AG, Germany

The European R4eGov project is working on solutions for interoperability and collaboration between European agencies. In this presentation, the speaker will provide an overall case study with scenarios discussing the collaboration and communication that may be secured using WS Security / Secure Conversation. An evaluation of these standards in terms of configuration complexity and overhead will be provided alongside potential attacks.

Quality of Service: Messaging

This session will provide an overview of the Estonian web-services based national communication infrastructure X-Road. X-Road has been in production for six years, connects about 460 organizations and mediates around 2 million requests per year. During this session, the speaker will describe the overall design of the system and rationale behind the design decisions, give an overview of the used technologies and presents the experience gathered from the implementation of the system.

Web Service Interoperability Platform (WSIP): A Framework for Automated Interoperability Testing Infrastructure
Speaker: Pyounguk Cho, Principal Product Manager, Oracle, United States and Nilesh Junnarkar, Software Development Manager, Oracle's Fusion Middletier Organization

The more SOA adoption takes place in the enterprise environment, the bigger the challenge becomes to ensure Web Services work among heterogeneous SOA platforms. Manual, rudimentary interoperability testing is not scalable, and it requires a tool and methodology that can automate most of the interoperability testing process if not all. In this session, WSIP(Web Service Interoperability Platform) will demonstrate how to achieve it.

Interoperable Government Panel: Moving from Standards to Implementation
Moderator: Paul Fremantle, VP/Technical Sales, WSO2, United Kingdom
Panelists: Frederic Law-Dune, Direction Generale de la Modernisation de L'Etat (DGME France) and Christian Lanng, National IT and Telecom Agency, NITA, Denmark

Many governments are moving towards implementing Open Standards for communications - between government departments, organizations, companies and citizens. For example, two key European projects - PRESTO in France and OIOSOI in Denmark - are using OASIS Open Standards to create profiles for communications that will be mandated over time. There are many challenges to be addressed: choosing the right standards, ensuring they are "ready for primetime", profiling usage - especially how different standards will be used together - and of course validating that the result is actually implementable. In this panel, we’ll pull together leaders in this space to discuss the challenges they have faced and the results they have achieved.

Closing Remarks and EML e-Voting Demonstration Report