What is SOA?....

I lately stumbled upon this website by Thomas Erl on SOA: What is SOA? He makes good point by pointing out the string confusion about SOA: "[...]there still remains a significant amount of confusion as to what exactly constitutes a service-oriented architecture. Some qualify an SOA project by the fact that Web services technologies are being used, while others classify SOA as a Web-centric variation of object-oriented design[...]".

It is true that many people understand SOA wrong, the most usual confusion being that with web services. SOA also is at the origin of strong discussions among experts, as to whether it is the right approach to achieve goals in flexible and reusable component-based architectures. The confrontation REST Vs. SOA is the one I heard and read about the most. One is clear, the industry strongly pushes SOA, as being the effort to standardize all methods and techniques that may have existed or been partly supported/implemented and that seek to reach the same goals as SOA does.

Marwane El Kharbili

Might google experience a recession?

Some voices might say it, Google might experience hard times. Its considerable source of revenue, clicks sponsored links has been experiencing a deceleration for the last three years, but this year have even been decreasing: -0,3 %. This is the first time that this happens. So many jumped on the information and speculated about a possible recession of Google's activity on this sector. Yahoo's activity has been decreasing by -1%. Microsoft's activity has been increasing with 4% however. Would this play a role in Microsoft's attempted overtaking of Yahoo?

Marwane El Kharbili.

Flock: My new favorite browser!

If you have been using internet in any way or the other in the last three years, you must have been noticing the revival of internet browsers, and the new competitivity taking place now. I myself must have been using at least 9 or 10 different browsers (productively, that means I have been regularly using them for education or private purposes, later also professionally). Of course not all at the same time. Before the times of firefox, I was an absolutely convinced fan of Mozilla, although I was stilusing textbased Mail clients on my Sun X-Terminal machine :D (so much for the integrated mail client, that's why I switched to firefox immediately, it was lighter, quicker and customizeable...).

Those were good times, and I must say I have never been a fan of Internet Explorer, it just simply always annoyed me. But I did that as I was a teenie and wanted to chat with friends all over the world, there was no other solution, at least that I knew of.

So this is to say that the new pluralism in internet browsers landscape is utterly refreshing. I have currently 4 different browsers on my machine, and believe me I kept busy trying to keep that minimal:

1. Mozilla Firefox (my absolute favorite, no question about that)


2. TheWorld browser (very good looking, functional, rapid browser using the IE6 Engine. It comes from China, I'm looking forward to see what the chinese got at stake for us!)


3. Safari (It looks great, works well, but lacks plug-ins and very important functionalities for me like mlti-line tabbed browsing and session management, without which I can't live)


4. IE6 (I never use this thing, apart from when an application only works correctly with IE6...don't ask me to update to IE7...)

So the only two I practically use are Firefox for professional purposes (everything that has to do with my work and my PhD) and TheWorld for personal use (send emails, write on my blog, listen to internet radios, and other personal surfing stuf). I need this separation for at least two good reasons:

1. The performance of my professional (I mean for professional purposes) surfing doesn't suffer from my personal one.
   


2. I can separate between the complexity of managing many tabs for each purpose (I can have up to 200 open tabs on Firefox sometimes, of which the performance each time astonishes me, although it eats almost all my RAM :D)

But now I guess I'll change my ride from TheWorld to Flock (see the screenshot I have made on my personal machine)! Flock allows me to manage all my web 2.0 and social surfing activities on one interface. I have noticed that I spend most of my private surfing time not only on reading news and learning more about religion, history, politics and science, but on social bookmarking sites, reading blogs and entries about all possile topics that are of interest to me. Social surfing plug-ins made my firefox slow and didn't go well along with my intended use of it.

On Flock I can:

1. Manage my Blogging acounts and edit entries and articles on my browser without using the blogging website's interface (Blogger, Blogsome, WordPress etc.)


2. I can watch videos on my computer or circulating on the web (media bar)


3. manage my accounts on social websites (such as facebook, twitter, youtube, flickr) and get notified as soon as there is any changes,


4. I manage all my RSS feeds (another entry about that at a later time, I want to talk about GreatNews)


5. I can upload and manage my photos on social Photo websites such as Photobucket


6. manage my social bookmarks on delicious, Digg or Magnolia


7. Centrally manage all my accounts and subscription to services


8. I also use it as a central management console for all my bookmarks from TheWorld and Firefox, and from social bookmarking websites

Now the best is, all I said doesn't come from the website's help nor is it any copy paste, it is simply what I can see on the interface when I start Flock. I am in love, this browser is great, I am expecting great times with it! Hope you'll enjoy it!

Marwane El Kharbili

Business Rules and the semantic Web

So when will the wedding take place? This seems to be the question everybody is asking about Business Rule Management (BRM) and the Semantic Web (SW). At least the buys from the European Business Rules Conference did (http://www.semantic-web-days.net/EBRC_start.htm). Last year they organized the Semantic Web Days at the EBRC 2007. It took the form of a tutorial by Gerd Wagner (University of Cottbus and REWERSE Project) and colleagues and an exhibition by innovative companies and research institutes to present the latest innovations. In the tutorial, Gerd Wagner talked about Rule Modeling and Rule Interchange between different representation formalisms. He also talked about the latter in the context of the approaches of the REWERSE European research project and the W3C RIF (Rule Interchange Format) working group of the W3C. Another project dealing with the question is the MUSING project, under coordination of our neighbors here in Saarbrücken, the DFKI, represented by the person of Thierry Declerck.

This is only one of many events tackling the question of bringing specialists of the two domains together, since they are working mainly on inherently adjacent issues. One of the characteristics of research on business rules is the variety of works from very different people with different backgrounds. Due to lack of communication and exchange, we undergo the risk of having to reinvent the wheel at each time. One will inevitably notice this if one works in the Business Rules domain and tries to get an overview and an incept of what is really going on in research about business rules.

There is no need to be an oracle to see how semantic web technologies can help business rule propagation, interchange and enforcement in systems all over the web (actually there is no reason why the same approaches could be used for most type of distributed environments and systems), but also what level of artificial intelligence awareness the use of business rules in the semantic web architecture and applications would bring. I only hope that after the REWERSE project is over, many researchers will get to know the results, take profit from the dissemination efforts of REWERSE and build on them, and that through the variety of backgrounds, positions and ideas, that we will bring Business Rule Management to the next level, being really productive in a semantic distributed environment.

Marwane El Kharbili

Ode to Facebook

This is an absolutely great way of (ironically) singing about new virtual social worlds. On the program today: Facebook (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b-fJxzpK7s)!

Marwane El Kharbili

Argan: Moroccan tree of life

Th Argan tree is a part of Moroccan culture. It is called the tree of life by all Berber tribes that live in the regions of morocco where the tree grows. This tres is very famous all over the world for many reasons. Even people in farthes regions know it, or a least their women, because it is part of many beauty and wellness products.

The Argan tree is one of the oldest in the world and way way older than we humans, it can live up to 400 years. At some obscure point in history (our planet's history, a Goliath compared to ours), the Argan tree started to grow only in arid and desertial environments. Now the tree grows solely in the Souss-Massa-Draa region of Morocco. Every attempt to make the tree grow anywhere else on earth has been unsuccessful up until now. Even in europe, people are starting to use the main product from the tree, Argan Oil, for cooking and beauty purposes.

The only people mastering the art of hand-pressed oil extraction from the tree are the Berber women of the tribes living in the Souss-Massa-Draa region. They have gathered on a cooperation to produce and export the oil. Medicinal properties of Argan oil are known by the Berbers since ages, and medicine confirms them. For more Information About Argan Oil, please read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argan_oil. In case you also want to learn why it is called Argan, have a look at how the arabs and berbers write it: http://www.plantnames.unimelb.edu.au/Sorting/Argania.html.

Marwane El Kharbili

He invented a revolutionary Engine at 15! The Genius from Uzbekistan!!

This is something crazy! A 15 year old from Uzbekistan has invented a revolutionary car engine. His name is Maruf Ovozi and he is very intelligent. Well, he must be, or else all conspiration theories about big corporations not wanting to discover new engines cause they would make less money are all true. This put aside, it is breaking news. this 15 year old prepared the engine for a high school competition at his home academic high school of Samarkand.

He transformed a normal combustion engine to make it able to work using compressed air. the astonishing thing is that the engine renews the stock of compressed air by itself without using any recharges. So the engine becomes practically autonomous. German engineers from the VAG group flew to him to work on developing the engine together. No need to say he won the competition...

Source: Yahoo news France. F. Gimpret.

Marwane El Kharbili

Here comes another bubble

Even if the maker of the video predicted (again) the bubble around the bubble being explained in the video, I can't help but react like the masses and blog about it!

This is a very funny video explaining the mechanism of Technology Bubbles which are to the IT world as cancer is to a human body (The comparison may not be the most subtile but I stand to it), they are impredictable, come quick and hard, one fights against them long before their effects ecome visble on stock exchange numbers but they eventually win most of the time (well for now I only knew about one and it was disastrous).

Enjoy this very funny video!



Marwane El Kharbili

Ontologies: State of the Art, Business Potential, and Grand Challenges

The title of this article is the title of the book I want to talk about. Yet another short book notification. The book is written by Martin Hepp, Pieter De Leenheer, Aldo De Moor and York Sure, all of them famous researchers in the field of knwoledge management and ontologies (not restricted to). This book introduces ontologies and discusses a number of parameters important for an ontology management project. The authors go on by clarifying the apports of ontologies on the basis of which they extract choices to be made in ontology design. the book concludes by showing what future developments can be expected in the field of ontologies.

These are informations about the book:

Series: Semantic Web And Beyond Computing for Human Experience. Volume 7
ISBN: 978-0-387-69899-1.
SpringelrLink: http://www.springerlink.com/content/k0r366152j2681n5/

A reference book probably , for reasearchers and practitioners of ontology design and management. Enjoy the read!

Marwane El Kharbili

My selection from the European Business Rules Conference 2008

I had promised to write an entry specifically to list my selection of talks at the 7th european business rules conference this year (June 16-18 2008). So let's get to the point here, I made a list of the most interesting talks from my point of view:

1. Benefits of a BR Management Tool / Repository and not a Requirement Management Tool by Shikha Khan(Application Project Manager, Rules Management)
2. Interaction between datamodels, rules and processes by Ralph Nijpels (KLM)
3. BRM without a rule engine by Petr Chotebovsky (Microsoft )
4. About the nature of Business Rules - Some basic answers from the perspective of Enterprise Ontology by Jan Dietz (TU Delft, The Netherlands)
5. Verification and Validation by Silvie Spreeuwenberg (LibRT)
6. Natural Language Parser for Business Rule Management by Rob van Haarst (Ness)
7. A Comprehensive Architecture for Business Rules by Mukundan Agaram (Senior Designer and Architect, Delta Dental)
8. Business Motivation Model by John Hall (Principal Model Systems Ltd.)

Now if you have a look at the line-up for this time, you would not want to miss this year's conference. My personal absolute favorites are numbers 2,4 and 6. Of course it is hard to choose because it really is all about what you already know and you are interested in at the moment for your organization.

Now there is still something about the tutorials to say here, I have made a pre-selection here, again solely based on the titles:

1. SBVR, business models and vocabulary by Sjir Nijssen and Donald Chapin.
2. Business Rules Standards in Practice by Markus Schacher, KnowGravity.

Many people don't know about standards in the Business Rule Management field, because there is not a lot of them, because they are very recent and because they are not yet set productively. Now my point is that such tutorials as those I have listed are really what we need to communicate about these standards, what business questions and needs they answe and how to use them.

Notice that the list of talks and tutorials is not yet complete so it might very well be worth another look in the next couple of months. I'll write another entry short before the conference anyways. Hope you'll make it in this year's edition!

Marwane El Kharbili.

Gartner Compliance & Risk Management Summit

Another quickie here, from the 3th to the 5th of March 2008. It'll take place in Chicago, at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers. For everyone interested in compliance Management and in Risk Management, this is a not-to-miss opportunity.

Marwane El Kharbili

Why do we lie?

After I read this article on Live Science , I have asked myself if the conclusions of the article did corespond to my opinion on why and how people lie at work. The article says of course that everybody lies, in different manners however. "It's tied in with self-esteem," says a university professor asserting that "as soon as people feel that their self-esteem is threatened, they immediately begin to lie at higher levels."

Reasearchers conducted research specific for the workplace. This research showed that employees lie more to their colleagues than they do to outsiders and that it's always tied with our self-estime and always being able to look good in front of everybodyLying is thus a question of image and self-protection, showing oneself and letting the others know that one does things well and even better than the others. The article concludes by saying: "Honesty is the best Policy!".

I personnally also think that people lie, the degrees of which can vary stringly depending on the situation, the position and the person itself. people can lie about the length of a meeting, about the quality of work, about results achieved in selling a product when talking to other colleagues from sales, lie when discussing why the technology they are using should be better that the one currently used in other products because they didn't know about the othertechnology, about the real price their car cost them or about their ability to repair their sink or their bike by tehmselves :D

Anyway I really advise you to read this article on Live Science, well written, kept quite short and presenting Research results.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Le rêve marocain

Cette video traduit peut-etre un chouia du mal-etre de notre pays, de ses gens. J'ai beaucoup aimé.



Marwane El Kharbili.

Enterprise Ontology

Does the title of this entry attract your attention? It does put mine under 5000 Volts anyway! This entry is about the following book:

• Enterprise OntologyTheory and Methodology
• by Dietz, Jan L.G.
• 2006, XIV, 244 p., Hardcover
• ISBN: 978-3-540-29169-5

If you've already tried one to model an ontology, you've certainly noticed how complex it is to do it for a single domain of expertise, even when one himself an expert is. Let alone describing complex and huge domains as ontologies. Enterprise modelling, construction and operation, so the author, is not a well formalized discipline. The enterprise Ontology pus itself as the answer to this problem. As part of the problematic, the book covers business processes, IS, control among other aspects. The book is destined primarily to researchers and graduate students. I haven't read the book yet, but I certainly will.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Business Rule Management and Processes

I have noticed the increase in amount of talks and webcasts on the net treating and evangelizing the alliance of Business Rule Management Systems (BRMS) and Business Process Management. I have heard some when I had time to, because I work on the topic and I am passionated by the possibilities that BRMS allow for. I am not going to list all the reasons why avery BPM project, design and requirement gathering method, as well as implementation should have Business Rules as one of its core components or concerns.

I want to put attention on two talks:

1. The first one has been held at gartner's Business Process Managemebt summit in Las Vegas this year (4-7 february 2008). Marc Kerremans gived a talk entitled "Business Rule Management: State of the Art" where he gave an introduction to BRM and tackled the question: "What added value does BRM bring to BPM?"
2. The talks that are to be held at the Business Rules Conference, this year from June 16-18 at the Marriott Hotel, Munich, Gemany. A key note presentation is to be given by Ronald G. Ross at the opening. The talk by Ralph Nijpels (KLM): "Interaction between
   datamodels, rules and processes", by Prof. Stef Joosten (CS dept. Open University): "Can business rules make process models obsolete?" and the talk by Jan Dietz (TU Delft, Netherlands): "About the nature of Business Rules - Some basic answers from the Perspective of Enterprise Ontology" are the ones that immediately caught my eye. The first two tackle the question of how to bring BR and BPM and the thirs one askes questions about semantics and Business Rules.

This was just a small entry to signal the fact that many talks are held to make the case for Business Rules and Business Rules and Business Process Management in particular. I foresee even more of these and related industrial conferences as the matter gets atention from the industry. As for the Business Rules Conference in June I will write a dedicated entry to tell about the talks that seem most interesting to me (at least from the name of them).

Marwane El Kharbili.

JBOSS World

In orlando, there are somethings going on right now. While BPM Experts from the whole world meet from the 13th to the 15th at IDS-Scheer's ProcessWorld, Open source Java Middleware experts are also meeting in Orlando, for this year's JBOSS World, from the 13th to the 15th of February. JBOSS World was last held in Las vegas, in June 2006, so this is a worthy comeback and a sign that interest in open source technologies is still on the up slope. On this page, you'll be able to get the latest news with nice videos and read the latest conference blog entries.

Marwane El Kharbili.

BPM basics for dummies

Although the discipline exists since more than 20 years (the IDS Scheer for example was founded in 1984 by Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. mult. August-Wilhelm Scheer), interest in Business Process Management has been increasing dramatically in the industry. The fact that all major players have brought up BPM strategies in recent years is a clear sign for that. But still are many people asking about BPM and thinking about getting fit in using BPM, although fear of new technologies and the buzz syndrom may slow down adoption in most cases (think about SOA). Many experts that most of the potential of BPM has still to be uncovered.

So it might not sound very strange that even Software AG, one of the major software providers in the world, after having acquired WebMethods (completed in june 2007), one of the biggest Business Process Integration software providers, have just made a book available. The book is entitled "BPM basics for dummies", and is destined to narrow adoption barriers of the technology. However the book is mainly treating the subject from the integration and software point of view, and not from the business point of view. The book is rather an introduction to BPM related technologies and a treats the topic more from the perspective of BPM Suites. Sections of the book proceed to a custom definition of BPM, then distinguish functional goals and what the added-values of BPMS are, then give discuss management and technological architectures that go with BPMS.

You can get the book on the corporate site of Software AG, all you need to do is register. The book is planned to be translated to French, Spanisch and German in April 2008. The book was written by Dr. Kiran K. Garimella (VP of BPM Solutions atSoftware AG), Michael J. Lees (Director of BPM Product Marketing at SoftwareAG) and Bruce D. Williams (SVP & GeneralManager of the BPM Solutions Group for Software AG). The most intriguiing and amusing in the book is the "for dummies" layout. It makes reading very easy-going and flowy. Most of all it remindedd me of one of the first books I read about computer science as I was a teenager "HTML for dummies" :D But those times are over.

My verdict: if you are solely intersted in implementing BPM someday, and looking for a detailed presentation of the way one of Business Process Management Suites' providers look at technical BPM and its IT implementation, then here is a compact, easy-to-read and very interesting small book (78 pages). The book can be easily read by newbies to BPM. But you shouldn't limit yourself to this book of course, rather think about how getting to know what BPM can really bring up your organization's corporate strategy, governance and processes to, while staying independant from implementation platforms.

Marwane El Kharbili.

PhD position at ARIS Research Open now!

At ARIS Research in Saarbrücken, we have currently an open position for a software engineer with the possibility of a PhD. The position is meant for 3 years. Supervision shall be made by the Wirtschaftsinformatik Institut at the Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken.

The position comprehends work on exploring the uses of web 2.0 technologies in conceiving context dependant and business process supporting telecommunication services.

PhDing in an industrial environment brings many advantages. Apart from working at the world leader in Business Process Modelling and Analysis, the position would allow you to build your career path in the industry, profit from the experience of people in various domains, work in a young anf highly motivating environment at ARIS research while conducting research on very challenging and demanding domains.

If you're interested, then have a look here at the position description, or send an email to jobs AT ids-scheer DOT de. I have to add that german language skills are required for the position since it os the spoken communication language here at the IDS. Some detailed information about the expected tasks, what the IDS has to offer to accompany a postgraduate work and how a PhD at the is organized is to be found on the blog of my colleague at ARIS Research: http://sebstein.hpfsc.de/2008/01/24/web-20-und-bpm-promotion/.

In case of any questions you may contact me at: Marwane DOT Elkharbili AT ids-scheer DOT com.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Fulltime POSTDOC in Semantic Technologies, STI International, Vienna

I have to make a quickie here. It is a bout a Postdoc position available at the STI2 International in Vienna, Austria. STI2 is a world leading institution in semantic technology Research (which is obvious if one knows that STI stands for Semantic Technologies Institute). STI2 is a regroupment of stakeholders in semantic technolgies from the academic, industrial and governmental communities.

The Postdoc position will require a person with an excellent PhD degree and some experience in semantic technologies. The exact description of the position is to be found here.

Marwane El Kharbili

IDS Scheer named 2007 SAP Channel Partner of the year!

A short post this time. IDS Scheer, has been named as 2007 SAP® Channel Partner of the Year in the United States. IDS Scheer also received "Distinction of Highest Customer Satisfaction Scores in Newly Released SAP Survey". Here the complete com: http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/index.jsp?epi_menuItemID=887566059a3aedb6efaaa9e27a808a0c&ndmViewId=news_view&ndmConfigId=1000108&newsId=20080204005268&newsLang=en.

Marwane El Kharbili.

WebSphere SOA and J2EE in Practice

WebSphere SOA and J2EE in Practice is the name of the IBM developerworks blog maintained by Bobby Woolf. The blog handles pretty much technical topics of currently highly relevant technologies. I'm speaking about SOA, J2EE (Of course, when speaking about Websphere). This, in the context of using IBM's J2EE products: Rational Application Server, Websphere Application Server, Websphere Process Server and Websphere Integration Developer.

The author of the blog has background in consulting using IBM's products and works for the IBM Software Services for Websphere unit of IBM. He authored the "Exploring IBM SOA technology and Practice" and co-authored 2 others.

There is an accompanying Wiki to the blog, although I personnally didn't see the point, till I read Bobby Wolf's answer to that question, here. As a foretaste to what the blog is about, read the post from the 31st of January, where a definition of Services as "Service Contract" is given. Interesting read from a very practice-related perspective.

For readers who are interested in the technical implementation of business processes (we at the IDS concentrate on "real" BPM, so-called Business BPM :D), this blog might give many interesting ideas about how questionings and experience in SOA and IBM's J2EE products. One to keep an eye on anyway!

Marwane El Kharbili.

BPM Conferences in february

On his blog (Column2), notifies sandy kemsley of three very interesting enterprise conferences in February:

• This week takes place Gartner's BPM summit from the 4th to the 7th of February.
• February 13th to the 15th is the ARIS Processworld (Americas) in Orlando. Title of this year's conference is "Improve Business Performance". Editions in berlin (June 16th-18th) and Hong Kong are also taking place in 2008. Sandy kemsley gathers all his posts to ProcessWorld under one hat, accessible here.
• february 18th-20th the FASTForward conference which covers Enterprise 2.0 topics (so Sandy kemsley). It is a "Business and Technology Conference Dedicated to Search-Driven Innovation" according to the conference's website. It is managed by the FASTSearch company.

Marwane El Kharbili.

BPM vendors to watch

In his article on http://www.ciozone.com/, Bob Violino lists IDS Scheer as one of the most notable BPM vendors to follow if you are interested in knowing about the main actors of a high-speed developing market (forrester research forecasts 15-25% growth in 2007 and 2008).

He gives his views on IDS Scheer and notes that the IDS "delivers an integrated portfolio of BPM products". Violino says, speaking about the ARIS framework that "The software covers every phase of a BPM project." He proceeds with a presentation of the different platforms of the ARIS framework, of its consulting and management services activities, on the collaboration with business partners and on the strategy of the company.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Bling Bling President

Today I want to tell about a phenomenum happening on the other side of the Rhine, because our beloved french neighbours have a new title for their president: Bling Bling president. The allusion is made to the jewelry usually worn by Hip-Hop stars and wannabe-stars :D

All opposition sand independant journals and media agree on using this term, which has somehow imposed itself in France. Liberation delivers in this article a very good analysis of the aspects of the president that are worth calling bling bling. Sarkozy travels de luxe, has douled his salary, has vacations on a luxus yacht while he just became president and should rather take care of a nation in crisis, sarkozy loves luxus jewelry, high-class dinners, loves to have hot ex-model singers as girl-friends (carla Bruni) and is ready to take on any fishe who insults him in a real man's fight. This completely cuts with the normal classy behavious of french diplomacy representatives. Think of Jacques Chirac, Valerie Giscard D'estaing or Mitterand.

Our british neighbours didn't miss the bizarre behavior of sarkozy and so do the americans. Of course are the germans not on the bank. As a conclusion this funny video gathers the caricatures made about the new bling bling habitudes sarkozy. I really hope the french will get conscious about what is really good for them and carefully choose their political leaders.

Marwane El Kharbili.