Generic Architecture for Intelligent Systems

Abstract This paper describes a generic architecture that can be applied to complex, intelligent systems that require provisions for 'Privacy by Design'. It describes the challenges for the designers and users of such system, principles for selecting components and a suggestion for a generic standard interface for controlling access and privacy.

Background: Inspired by the current discussion in Denmark concerning the need for 'welfare technology', i.e. the next generation of what used to be called 'Tele Medicine', aiming primarily at elderly and/or people with chronic diseases living in their own homes, and the recent focus on intelligent homes, 'passiv systems' as described by Colin Calder as well as 'smart grids', it is obvious that all three domains represent variations of the same class of problems. The basic inspiration is actually from the founders of Cybernetics- We are focusing on control systems, whether we are discussing welfare/well being of humans, emission of CO2 from our houses, controlling/optimizing the use of the available amount of electric energy in a grid, water consumption etc. As we are also heavily engaged in the challenges with 'the internet of things', as the Danish technology Council is right now trying to cope with in a national analysis, we know that before long we will have more intelligent gadgets connected on the internet than we have human beings on the surface of the Globe. So we are talking of a complex network of 'gadgets' that each have an address on the IPV6 network (whether this is static or dynamic), and not least we are talking of a man-machine network of dimensions we have not yet seen.

Challenges

So what are the major challenges and how do we cope with them? First of all the Complexity is huge. There is a need for a simple way for human beings to understand this complexity and make it manageable if not intuitive.

There is also a lack of common standards that will lead to development of fractions of systems that will not easily connect to each other. If this is not solved, we will still be in the situation a hundred years from now that we 'think' we have a firm infrastructure, but in fact are using yesterdays technology far beyond applicability. Components have to be replaced as technology progresses. We can hardly believe that the CONTINUA alliance nor ZIGBEE alliance will be sufficient to include also smart grids systems, intelligent cars etc.

The basic example of this kind of backward thinking is that the distance between the rails of a railroad (in UK, US) is exactly the distance between the wheels of the roman war chariots. These chariots dictated the construction of roads - and that is where the railroads where first laid.

Lack of a standardized, simple user interface:

Imagine your own house in 10 years: How many gadgets do you have installed then? Controlling your energy consumption, your heating, your communication with the external world, your car, your dog, your children? Your refrigerator and it's contents? And possibly also your blood pressure, blood sugar, weight, exercise and more if your are elderly, alarm system to warn against intruders, systems to help park your car etc. Now, when your TV got 40 channels, when you connected it to a DVD and later maybe to the internet, you still got the remote control – but where is the standardized remote control for your intelligent house ?

Lack of an intuitive and simple way to control use of your private data.

When all you gadgets, well – most of them – are also connected to the outer World, how do you control that your personal data are not revealed to other than those that you have deliberately chosen as trustworthy partners for those particular data? Your mobile phone today contains Apps that will reveal your whereabouts to a lot of third parties, your car will contain history and log of where you have been, how fast you have been driving, your kids can be located by GPS, your buying habits can be combined with your location – and potentially your insurance company can

be informed, if you have a tendency to forget to close the windows, turn off the water in the bath tub – just to mention a few, before we even touch medical and health data. It is not likely that you will just let go of all this info, leave it to 'big brother' or you benevolent neighbor. But how do you manage all this in a simple way?

Approach – The Basic Control/Feed Back system - Any gadget is either a part of or a complete control/feed back system. It will look like this:

Any type of regulator contains these components: The detector checks the intended target, say room temperature, provides the input to the logic system that decides, according to predefined rules, that it is either too hot or too cold and sends signal to an effector, an actuator, to turn on a heater or turn it off. The result is then measured by the detector etc. The snag here is in the logic and the lag between measuring and controlling, but that's another story. Now, some systems may have only the detector and the logic requiring a human being to act as an effector, but the concept is the same.

The model can then be extended in several ways, the first way is an identifier for each sub-component and an identifier for the system as such. It may or may not be the same as an IPV6 address or it can be linked to the IPV6-address. The purpose of the ID is to keep the system in control and avoid unintended change of components. Yet on the other hand, a component could be exchanged, as it's ID is accepted by the system as such to allow for new technology etc.

Now we need to add something to this model, we need to store program and data, that is produced by the system so we extend the model with 3 types of stored info: 'Rules', PID Data, and Non-PID Data. First we need to have a store for the rules - as we may have to re-program the system - or if we install an 'expert system' that learns from the success of the regulation and changes lags, size of impact, duration of impact etc. Then we need to log data. Either the data is connected with a human being and is personally identifiable or it is 'neutral', for instance concerning environmental data. This is important as we shall see later when we introduce the privacy design in this system.

External partners - Next step is of course to introduce the outer World and the surrounding networks, 'grids', external expert systems, external experts, doctors etc. The simplest case of course is to allow external sources access to non-personal data, as will be the case for intelligent grid systems, where changes in external data like pricing of electricity or availability of water, will allow local appliances to be turned on or off according to the pre- programmed rules. This simple model can be applied to all non-PID items in your house, including your intelligent refrigerator that controls the ordering of fresh milk, expiry dates for meat and eggs etc. as well as your use of dish washing machine at times with low energy costs etc. etc.

In this picture we have added human interven- tion as assistants for the PID-related data.
(One might of course have automatic response systems for some PID-items).
The idea is here that the access rights as well as the data transmission are controlled by an ACL – a so-called Access Control List, which is
a list controlled by the user in exactly the same way as you control which individuals among your friends that belong to which specific group of trusted partners. This is a role based access mechanism, and by using the Facebook/Google+ type of management, it is intuitive for each user, that your house doctor has a need to know about your heart condition, while your neighbor is only allowed to know if you are out of house.

Privacy by Design

Whenever a gadget is installed, it is either immediately configured with access controls defining a 'role' of supporters, that are allowed access, or you are asked to define, which role of supporter you will allow access to this particular class of PID. In a different set up – 'Facebook-like' – you can then maintain the coupling between the actual persons by their digital identity credentials for the persons that should be allowed access acting in the particular role.

In the example above there are more than one home nurse that will visit you, so each is granted data access under the role of home nurse. In some cases – for instance if your life sign indicator signals that you haven't moved or breathed for a defined (short!) period, an alarm immediately goes off at the same time with the doctor and at the alarm centre. Some data are irrelevant for some roles, your therapist may only be interested in your weight, and in some cases the data are not actually sent as an alarm but may be retrieved by a defined role in case of emergency.

Conclusion- By applying basic concepts of control system mechanism and straight forward, Facebook-inspired control of identities (=friends) belonging to a specific group = role, the user can control sharing of personal data, also in complex systems. The components of the total system can be changed if the interfaces are constructed according to defined standards, and all components are equipped with specific identities to ensure tracking and maintenance.

Of course a lot of other considerations has to be added depending on the detailed functions of the gadgets, and also the decision modules, rules, detailed function of expert systems will have to be specified. But the basic architecture, thanks to Norbert Wiener, need not be too complicated.

The IBM Centennial - IBM Denmark Milestones 1970-2011 (part 2)

(This picture was published in Gyldendal's Encyclopedia in 1971 under the heading: 'Modern Electronic Data Processing'. It was taken a few months after I started in IBM and was deeply engaged with the 360/40 simulating The Maersk Company's container traffic using GPSS. It was a proof-of-concept, that led the Maersk Company to invest heavily in management systems for containers, and was as such the first milestone that I remember.)

From 1970 to 2011: Until the first oil crisis business was booming – the big Data centers really took off, both in the financial sector and in the public sector, where the major part of the cities now joined forces in Kommunedata matching the equally powerful Datacentralen, owned by the State Government.

The first major project IBM had with the Aalborg Kommunedata Center was the so-called 'Project Database' where we spent a year to map all transactions, work flows, and archives in the city of Aalborg and jointly developed a complete catalog of municipal applications as an idea. This was in fact used for Kommunedata's first on-line success, the SIP-system with info on Tax, Income and Personal Data. It was a predecessor for what later became known as Enterprise Architecture and used as teaching material at university level.

After the success of the 'pay-as-you go'-tax and the Central Personal Registration System, the next major application area became the Social Security System (Sygesikring/Dagpenge), probably the most ambitious system of it's kind. Kommunedata worked hard to solve all the inconsistencies in the legislation and by something close to a miracle - and a very firm controlling hand - the system was launched in 1973. Behind the scene it was a mess

– integration consisting of tapes being carried from one sub-system to another, but it worked.

In IBM DK we formed a 'think tank' giving advice to new uses of Government DP and among other initiatives we launched the 'Government Game' – you could say an early version of 'SimCity' which really opened the eyes of many politicians and top managers during the many seminars we arranged. An other new thing was the creation (in APL!) of what we called 'SiSyFos-model' (In Danish this was short for Taxes, Income and Social Benefits seen from a Family perspective). This was the first time all these diverse legislative initiatives, all depending on actual income, family size etc. were brought together. With astonishing results showing the problem areas where marginal taxation exceeded 100%!. This was later taken over by Datacentralen and the Ministry of Finance as a general law-model and has been refined ever since.

At the same time my IBM colleagues in the Health Sector developed the first on line Medical Record System, 'The Red System' – because the proposal was wrapped in red paper. It was based on DB/2 (Well, IMS) and ran on 3270 screens (4 colours!). It was developed by 3 counties and in 76 it became part of Kommunedata's new County/Medical Center in Skejby, Aarhus.

Other milestones of IBM Denmark impact in the 70'ies were undoubtedly the massive investments made by the Danish Banking sector. It was the dawn of the banking terminal era based on the IBM 3600-terminals and major main frame solutions. And in the beginning of the 80'ies an extraordinary thing happened in Denmark as the banks agreed to implement a common debit card system, the DanCard, and created a joint center, the PBS, to handle this and soon all major credit cards business as well. This greatly influenced the way the Danish population became accustomed to 'EDP'.

As the 3rd generation computers - the IBM 360 announced in 1964 - were replaced by the 303X-series, the competitive marketplace changed once again for IBM, and in parallel with the 'high end' 303x customer segment new initiatives for the SMB-market were on their way, so the early 80'ies saw the beginning of the era of SMB and Business Partner way of marketing. Also the personal computer entered the market place and IBM's PC was born. In a garage in Boca Raton, Florida based on standard components and external SW - but the brand name immediately made it a success.

In Denmark we saw the opportunity to go for the educational market – Schools and Universities – and mainly because we focused much more on SW, applications, 'Teachware', plus solutions for handicapped children - and how this new technology could be used by teachers, IBM soon became the absolute leading brand in the Danish Schools – from general schools, to High Schools to Teacher's Seminars.

(The poster illustrated our new style of communication with the young generation - we couldn't use Chaplin, we dis-liked the Pink Panter so this was one our favourites)

In the late 80'ies as the industry turned to distributed data processing, competition turned to Unix and mini computers, and the early 90'ies witnessed the problems of IBM doing the traditional stuff. Lou Gerstner 'Taught the Elephant to dance', but in the process a number of IBM'ers were laid off, something never seen before. Because IBM Denmark always had a reputation for running a tight ship, the impact here was in fact minimal, although felt hard enough by those exposed to it. And the major reorganisation for the first time really put an emphasis on services – from consulting to hosting services to programming. And IBM Denmark struggled for this.

In the early 90'ies we looked for new business and one of the milestones during this period was the first projects for TeleMedicine. The first project was implemented with the Viborg County where pictures of tumors scanned by an electronic microscope and via 2 ISDN-lines were transmitted to a specialist hospital where the experts could judge on the nature of the sample shown in the picture. The next pioneering project was sending Magnetic Scanning pictures from Queen Ingrid's Hospital in Nuuk, Greenland, to the National University Hospital, where the pictures of unborn babies could be studied to decide whether the pregnant ladies should be transported to Denmark or give birth locally under advice from the specialists. Also video conferencing systems were pioneered, partly with Danske Bank.

So even at this harsh time there was a focus on new business opportunities. - And then we entered the Internet age – first called 'Multimedia'. Some of the early projects included a plan with Datacentralen to install 1000 information booths in Denmark with access to all public information, but it soon became clear that this idea was overtaken by the rapid development of 'the Net', and 'eBusiness' emerged.

So IBM Denmark played a leading role in this – We helped the City of Copenhagen launch their first major web-site with on line access to a huge database with practical information, we launched a joint county-company website in North Zealand with the first websites of prominent companies like DSV and Coloplast, and we participated in 1999 with the first secure payment systems using internet payment for eBusiness solutions in cooperation with PBS and the Egmont on line book shop.

The new IBM led to acquisition of a number of companies: From the Lotus SW company to Price Waterhouse's consulting group, to CMA hosting services to Maersk Data and through Maersk the Acure Health Services company originally part of LEC, the Danish Agricultural Data Center.

Among the major milestones for the first 10 years of the new millennium was undoubtedly the health portal, Sundhed.Dk, for the first time integrating a remarkable number of back-end systems from medical records to medicine prescriptions, communication systems across the health sector and between patients and doctors, doctors and specialist. This major websphere portal received several international prices and is still one of the top international solutions in the World.

Maybe less visible but equally important was the consulting effort towards the central Governments IT Task Force developing the Danish ICT Public strategy. IBM has contributed to this rather consistently since the very first reports in the 90'ies and until today using IBM methodology to map the relevant domains and activities across the public sector (FORM, STORM).

In the local Government area the most exciting development was happening in the municipalities, partly as a result of the major reorganisation that took place in 2007 but prepared during the period from 2003-2006. During these years IBM consulting developed and tested Enterprise Architecture solutions that helped different authorities to merge their operations. If one city should be mentioned, it must be the City of Odense, where joint efforts between the City IT staff, the business partner and IBM resulted in a quite spectacular solution covering both intranet, citizen services and linkage to a number of back end solutions.

The largest public sector solution in Denmark was undoubtedly the deMARS-project for the Defense. A huge multi-year SAP project designed and implemented by IBM. The system was delivered in 2005, and IBM is now also responsible for operations.

Of course a number of important sales and implementations took place in the industrial sector as well as in the major banks – Nordea, Danske Bank – rapidly becoming the largest IT installations in the Nordics. Maersk Company, Carlsberg, NovoNordisk and many more were equally in the forefront of ICT development, but if one real new activity should be mentioned, it must be the Edison project, were IBM teamed up with DONG energy, BetterPlace electrical Cars, the Technical University of Denmark to produce a pilot project in Bornholm, were windmills would create up to 80% of the anticipated power consumed, using the batteries of the electric cars as a storage and a buffer in periods with more wind than needed. This is part of the 'family' of projects that IBM launched under the heading 'A Smarter Planet'. Around the World these kind of projects will be fundamental for the success of the company during the next hundred years.

The nature of the ICT market has changed over the 100 years of IBM operations in Denmark – the competition has changed from decade to decade. And the company has changed. But what has remained intact is probably the fighting spirit and the teamwork among the members of the company – including the 'new comers', the 'light blue employees', those that did not choose IBM as their first choice but was bought into the family. The milestones I have highlighted of course reflect my personal experience but nevertheless I think covered the major successes and also some of the small, but innovative steps that moved IBM forward.

(See part 1 of the centennial blog)

e-Government - Outlook 2011

It seems to be a common practice for newsletters, newspapers and magazines to publish expectations for how trends in technology is going to affect our everyday life in the coming year.

As Gartner already discovered several years ago, some of these predictions turn out to be mere hype, not yet ready for large scale implementation, while other trends seem to emerge without anybody watching until they are suddenly there.

With a clear risk that some of my predictions will fall in the first of these ditches, I will try to come up with a qualified guess as to what kind of e-Government solutions we can expect to see in 2011 – not in every country – (particularly not my own home country, Denmark, who will be stuck with an election that will be a decisive factor in any kind of new investments in e-Gov) – but at least in some of the other, more advanced countries.

So let's look at:

• The iPad and tablets

• Cloud Computing

• Internet of things

• Social computing and eGov 2.0

• Interactive Health Care solutions

• Mobility and Identity Management

• Business Analytics – 'smart computing'

• Green computing

Everybody is fascinated about the rapid take-up of the iPad. The impact for Government will be clearly best suited for the education and and training area with lost of new teachware applications based on Apps and networking solutions. However, I expect the education sector to focus much more on the Android marketplace due to the pressure on costs, while the iPad will be reserved for the more expensive segments, interactive magazines and business applications, where the tie-in to Apple is of lesser importance. For the real large scale market it is going to be exciting to see if Tata's new 30 $ tablet PC takes off. If this is the case, ICT literacy in the third World may become a reality.

Cloud Computing and eGovernment at this stage seems to a bit of a contradiction; until the privacy issue is solved and firmly agreed upon between EU, US and Asia, Cloud computing in Government has to be restricted to private clouds where the actual location of data can be proved. If however, a new 'safe harbour' agreement can be made between EU and US we may begin to see large scale cloud computing for a lot of central and local government solutions. The pressure on economy and costs inevitably points in this direction, but my best guess is that before Cloud Computing can become a dominating factor for e-Government, at lot of consolidation and a phase of virtualization for major, old fashioned applications has to be made. As the cobol programmers are dying out, there will be a market for new main frame skills as this will be the next step before virtualization and before cloud computing for real.

Internet of things – as RFID enters any business, we can expect a number of new applications for eGovernment: traffic control, customs inspection, fishery inspections, health care provision controlling logistics, food inspection and drug control will be obvious areas, and I expect quite a number of new applications in this area.

Social Computing and eGov2.0 has been on the agenda for quite some time – and even if recent OECD analysis and predictions seem to demonstrate that a large number of public sector managers expect that web 2.0 is just around the corner in several corners, the up-take in reality has been quite slow. Where it has been emerging it has clearly been implemented in a sort of protest against existing 'official' solutions. In UK, for instance, the group that has published a mash up solution to identity which farmers have received the most funding from EU, is one example. 'rate my teacher' in US is another.

In some countries Government has tried to open up databases for the public – but only in a vey limited scale. In Denmark, for instance, the Minister for IT awarded an innovation award to a Danish girl who produced a GPS-based mash up that could tell the shortest distance to a public toilet. Practical, but hardly an example of citizen inclusion. My expectation is that in 2011 the best eGov 2.0 solutions are still left with the rebels.

Interactive Health Care (formerly labelled Telemedicine) is long overdue and it my hope and expectation that 2011 will see the first real, large scale applications aiming at supporting chronically ill persons in their own home. The cost pressure is simply too massive to let this low hanging fruit untouched. The major problem is not the ICT equipment as such but how to rethink the organizational aspects behind the solution – hot line support services, surveillance personnel, lines of communication with doctors, specialists, hospitals. I dare state that any of the Nordic countries really could start this on a large scale so we could move from the pilot state of affairs where we have been stuck for the last 10 years.

Mobility and Identity Management will most likely be 're-invented' in 2011. Now that most EU countries (expect Denmark) has issued smart card ID-solutions, the next phase will merge intelligent mobile phones with ID-solution and payment cards. This will enable citizens with a limited ICT capability to come to citizen service centre and by means of the mobile get help to access the public services in a secure way. Already in some 3^rd World countries the mobile phone is used as a payment device, and there is no reason why we couldn't use this in other more 'advanced' countries.

Business Analytics and large scale computing (also using cloud scalability) is rapidly gaining momentum in the World of Science. But as a predictiontool for social development, economic trends, electricity usage, flood control, traffic control, disease management, the current state of massive parallel computing and the sw-tools around it will lend itself to better use to formulate and test public policies; from demographic forecasts in the 70'es to climate and emission control in 2011 and beyond is a clear line. We have the tools by now, and particularly the climate issue should make this kind of applications much more attractive as an investment area for politicians that look beyond their own nose.

Green computing is really a combination of virtualization, mass storage, cloud computing – and maybe also open source computing. As computers account for 2% of all electricity consumption and 2/3 of this is really costs of running idle, the ICT industry has to assist in optimizing use of power for ICT. And the public sector seems to be extremely well fitted for being the first area where ICT could be utilized in a much more intelligent way. The next step, as we have seen in some countries, will be to invest in intelligent electricity networks and to use international exchange systems to optimize the use of power.

So there will be a lot to look for during 2011 – as a tax payer I will state that any government has an obligation to review current use of ICT - not as a stand-alone exercise, but in a close relation with the strategies and policies to make the public sector more efficient, fine tune processes and skip outdated procedures, re-use data and information and empower the citizen in a way that will make it much more attractive not only to use self-service, but also to participate socially and assist relatives, neighbours and people in the local community. It will probably be the only way the Western Welfare Society as we know it may survive.

IT History - Fractions from a Journey

On December 30. I had my last working day with IBM. After 39½ years I received a very nice offer, and yet it was a strange feeling trying to summarize all the changes I have lived through since I joined the IBM Denmark company in 1970. It wasn't really my intention to make a career out of it – I graduated as a Master Economist, but I got interested in Data Processing, and decided that the best place to learn more probably was in the department for Operating Systems in IBM. At that time the Disk Operating System (DOS) was being outdated by OS that came in two brands: OS/MFT (Multiprogramming with a fixed number of tasks) and OS/MVT for the REALLY big machines allowing a variable number of transactions concurrently.

The picture here is me in 1970 and the photo was illustrating 'Modern Data Processing' in the Danish encyclopedia. It was a 360/40 – huge machine, 256K memory.

Over the years a lot of rather dramatic changes occurred – both in the way the Company was organized, in technology and in the competitive landscape. I soon got captured by the Government Branch and spent most of my career working with Government in some way, interrupted by assignments in Stockholm organizing and running Sales School and internal Training in mid 70's and handling staff job in the early 1980's and again in the mid 90's.

My first job was with what became one the 4 DP Centers for the Kommunedata organisation, and the first center to work with typewriter terminals to run financial management systems. 5 years before the color screens and the Systems network Architecture was announced. I later become responsible for the entire local Government and Health Care market, which had a fantastic growth in the late 70'es

IBM changed dramatically in the early 80'es – we had been split up in 3 divisions, DP (the Large Customer segment), GB (mid size machine and small and medium customers) and the DCS - the Data center Operations. The split was made to prepare for a split up if a court ruling found IBM guilty in monopolistic behavior, but thanks to the growing competition from Amdahl for the high machines, Memorex and similar for peripheral and Digital for mini computers, IBM avoided to be cut up and instead pooled the resources. Then in 1981 the IBM PC suddenly emerged as a new star – based on standard components bought on the open market it seemed to be the brand name that sold the product. I was asked to organize a group of system engineers and salesmen to conquer the Danish Education and Scientific market for the PC's, and I had the pleasure of interviewing some 300 teachers before hiring 6 of them – with sweaters and hairy faces and everything. Plus a nice lady, a French teacher from a high school. In fact we succeeded in just 4 years, the mantra was that it was not the question of the Hardware but how the software could help the teachers. It worked – and I still recall the first IBM PC we sold with 2 diskette stations, 256K for 7.000 US Dollars (35.000 Danish Kroner). At the end of the 80'es and early 90'es I was responsible for Market Development for the Public Sector (including Post, Defense, Central Government, Tele). At that time it was dawning on IBM's management that the business model had to change and that we had to charge for our skilled Systems Engineers and Networking CE's. The Business Consulting area began to be the hot topic, but my position - together with some of the former Government Branch Managers - was that it was important to marry the consulting skills with deep industrial knowledge. We lost the argument, and the General Business Consultant emerged, later to be split into practices and boosted by the subsequent purchase of Price Waterhouse. (See: Seven Keys to Success )

In the 90'es a new thing emerged – the Internet. Although I already got acquainted with it during my job with the University Sector, it wasn't until around 1994 that it became clear that a new market was emerging; I started a fantastic group of quite young people, creative designer-types and long haired programming freaks plus a couple of deeply engaged old time Systems Engineers. Within just a few years we managed to create first-of-a-kind of websites for Copenhagen City, a number of Danish Companies, plus launched the first secure payment systems on the Internet. And then suddenly – it all became 'pervasive' – which in practice meant that the profit margin for doing websites and similar solutions were coming down, and that the new business model would call for a value chain of Business Partners and IBM withdrawing to delivering the SW platforms and intermediate layers.

So the turn-around of the Company mid to late 90's architected by Lou Gerstner, once again laid to a dramatic change in organization, and started the period of active acquisitions, that Sam Palmisano carried on. As of today, the organization is split in divisions reporting to global or regional managers, and the coordination that is necessary in every major customer engagement handled by a an all-encompassing CRP and accounting system and strict procedures for bidding.

Since the end of the 90'es I have worked internationally as an eGovernment Advisor in a job working with the public sector and the Software group – plus of course a number of dedicated business partners and our GBS people that on and off have supported Public Sector.

This has been an enormousinspiration, has brought me to the Middle East working with the forward thinking Governments in Dubai and Quatar, I have witnessed and supported the Baltic Countries in their quest to outgrow the older parts of Europe, with Iceland, with the Nordic Countries and during the last few years with Greenland and the new Greenland parliament, which I hope to continue as a ppensioner.The dramatic changes in the IT world since 2001 and the rise of the Open Source Community is a trend, that I expect we have only seen the tip off. When Cloud Computing really takes off, the business model for selling Software Licenses will change once again and the new competitive landscape will be different from anything we have seen so far. Google probably aiming to become the next top competitor and Microsoft standing to loose.

And this may be some of the reasons IBM has survived all the turmoil – at least during my 39½ years: We have always been careful to select the battlefield. The competitors we had in the late 70'es were all gone 10 years after; the competitors we had in the 80'es have almost all disappeared, with HP as an exception. And with IBM now launching the Smart Planet approach and going for Software as a service and supporting Open Source, the competitors in 10 years again will be a different crowd. An old IBM'er told me 25 years ago that IBM meant: I'll Be Moved – because the mantra of the company is change.

So I will. And I have promised to start to document IBM Denmark's History. It started January 1. 1950 as a local Danish Operation. It shouldn't be too difficult – after all I have lived through 2/3 of the history myself!

The European Union and web 3.0

Already in October 2008 the European Commission launched a consultation on Web 3.0 to try to position Europe and to communicate a strategy to the member states during 3.rd quarter of 2009 proposing a policy approach “addressing the whole range of political and technological issues related to the move from RFID and sensing technologies to the Internet of Things”

This indicates that at the time of the initial consultation, the commission’s view of Web 3.0 was more focused on the ‘internet of things’ than the current understanding of being the semantic network of interrelated data, or as Tim Berners-Lee put it: “The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.”

During the Autumn a number of external experts critized the Commission for lack of innovation and understanding of web 3.0. See for instance this blog critizising the Commisioner Vivianne Reading: http://blog.semantic-web.at/2008/09/30/eu-commissions-short-sighted-definition-of-web-30/

So what is the current status of EU’s view on web 3.0?. In January 2009, Gerard Santucci, Head of Unit from DG Information Society and Media, presented his and his unit’s view on the status of the IoT for the conference on the Future of the Internet. At this point the EU seems to begin to focus also on the tremendous amounts of data that could be available – either as a direct result of collected data through the IoT or by making data available online, so Santucci in his paper also stressed the need for security around it: “The exercise of data subject rights in the context of intelligent networked environments will require the creation of complex Identity Management systems, based on interoperability, identification, authentication, and authorisation.”

In May EU hosted a conference on the Future of the Internet in Prague. This was a step towards a much more comprehensive understanding of the potential promises of the semantic web, and an excellent video was presented here. Also the Swedish Government, before their presidency of ERU beginning July 1, 2009, was present and demonstrated through State Secretary Leif Zetterberg a more forward looking attitude, but again no mentioning of the opportunities and issues around the potential for a semantic web in Europe. His focus areas were 1) formulate a new ICT strategy for Europe from 2011-2015, 2) Harmonize use Digital TV Frequencies in Europe as well as creating one common market for telecommunication industry, and 3) aiming at a secure infrastructure. But no words on making public data available or securing interoperability to create a whole new web 3.0 market place. Hopefully the Swedish Presidency will redress this during the fall.

In June the commission launched an action plan to embrace ‘The Internet of Things’ (IoT) including a comprehensive list of sub-action items, 13 in all ranging from Governance of IoT, over Privacy, Risc Assessments, Impact on Society, Need for Standards, Research Needed, Public-Private Partnership for IoT, RFID Issues, Institutional Awareness, International Dialogue to Measurement of the Uptake. But not much information about one of the key issues in the i2010 Strategy for ICT: Creation of a Single European Information Space with a strong emphasis on Content Online, as stated by Ken Ducatel, Head of Unit from DG/INFSO responsible for the follow-on program to the i2010 in a presentation in March 2009.

In May 2009 a group of international experts called upon the EU Commission to increase focus of solving the inherent problems of the current infrastructure and standards in the Internet:

“The Internet was never designed for how it is now being used and is creaking at the seams. We have connectivity today but it is not ubiquitous; we have bandwidth but it is not limitless; we have many devices but they don’t all talk to each other. We can transfer data but the transfers are far from seamless. We have access to content but it can’t be reused easily across every device. Applications and interfaces are still not intuitive, putting barriers in the way of the Internet’s benefits for many people. And, since security was an afterthought on the current Internet, we are exposed in various ways to spam, identity theft and fraud.”

So the experts is trying to put focus back again on some of the key words for web 3.0: Seamless data exchange, re-use of content, open interfaces. Plus – of course – the challenges raised by the mere fact that we are running out of addresses in IPV4 and need to plan for IPV6 as fast as possible.

The timing of this statement is quite crucial as the hearings for the next ICT Strategic plan – the i2015 – is just about to start, and the more consultations with experts and with country spokesmen that point to these problems, the more likely it will be that EU will see the potential of the semantic web within a short time frame.

In some areas, particularly Health Care, it is obvious that a clear use of semantics is a mere necessity for cross border interoperability and for exchange of electronic patient records, a long lasting problem of standardization even within each member country. (Denmark, for instance, has got at least 5 different standards for EPR’s).

In June 2009 EU organized a seminar for ‘Ontology-driven interoperability in eHealth’. This marked a midterm in a 3-year project trying to define the standards needed and the necessary steps towards interoperability in the eHealth area. The Picture above illustrates the problem. In this context the organisations involved cover the key players for web 3.0: CEN, CENELEC, ETSI, W3C, ISO, OASIS and the more health care oriented standardisation committees CONTINUA and IHE. The eHealth domain as well as the eProcurement domain which I mentioned in my earlier blog on web 3.0, seem to be well on their way towards practical results and methodologies that can be deployed by other domains.

While EU is gaining its forces and collecting input from all over on the upcoming priorities, the web 3.0/Semantic web environment is slowly progressing, for each day and month producing simple-to-use, practical tags and definitions. See for instance these 4 examples of practical microformats enhancing exchange of information on personal identity, calendar inputs and other:

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1773550/semantic_web_4_fundamental_microformats.html

In the meantime, led by David Osimo, a crowd sourcing initiative is taking place to create the People’s declaration on the i2015. Suggest you visit the page and register and vote for the top priorities. As of to day the top rated recommendation is: release government data in free, open, standard, readily available, accessible formats Or – if you want to participate in an upcoming event on the semantic web and it’s potential, register at: http://iswc2009.semanticweb.org/