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October 2005 Newsletter
From the Executive Director
The NATO conference in Edinburgh was an extraordinary event not only for the presentations but also for the entertainment arranged or rather orchestrated by the British NATO Codification Bureau. It was indeed a unique occasion and the venue was well chosen. For those of you who have visited Edinburgh it is a beautiful city with great food and even greater hospitality. The eOTD was featured in both the Chairman’s opening and closing remarks as well as in a number of presentations through out the conference. Dan is working with the organizers to make the presentations available through the ECCMA website. Following the NATO conference several of us traveled to Hangzhou, China for the fall ISO TC184/SC4 meeting. The eOTD was the subject of a number of presentations and working group meetings as where ISO 22745 and ISO 8000. Significant progress has been made on ISO 22745 and we expect to see the first committee draft submitted for ballot at the end of this month.
ISO 8000 was the subject of considerable debate with a number of countries initially opposing the new work item agreeing to change their vote and participate in the project. ISO 8000 will define a framework for assessing data quality in terms of the open resolution of data element tags as well as introduce a process for identifying the authoritative source of the data. More and more companies are starting to understand the importance of data tagging and the dangers of using third party tags that are by their very nature copyright. The fact is that the eOTD concept identifiers are in the public domain and resolvable to a definition over the internet is becoming increasingly important as companies review their long term data retention policies.
I took advantage of the visit to China to stop by our offices in Vellore., India. The last time I visited our research and development facility was in 2001 and I was delighted to be able to spend time reviewing the operation and discussing the challenges ahead. ECCMA India is a unique facility staffed by experienced and dedicated experts and I was more than impressed by the development since my last visit. The most notable development is the dramatically improved Internet access that rivals what we have here at our executive offices. Our core staff of managers has been with us for over five years now and the depth of their knowledge and experience is obvious. The continued development of the eOTD will be complimented by a new implementation guide registry and an improved library of presentations and training materials. The ECCMA Research and Development facility will also play an increased role in supporting eOTD implementations in Asia and the Middle East.
Although it is almost a year away now is a good time to start planning for the 2006 ECCMA conference. Combining the 50th meeting of ISO TC184/SC4 with the ECCMA conference will provide a unique opportunity to bring together the developers of standards for three dimensional representations and manufacturing (STEP) with the developers of standards for cataloging, data abstraction and resolution of UID and RFID. The traditional ECCMA Speaker Dinner on Tuesday night will be combined with the ISO TC184/SC4 50th Awards dinner and should be a great evening. The Wednesday morning ISO plenary session will be followed by the ECCMA plenary panel. From 12:00 noon until 5:00pm we will open the supplier exhibition for eOTD application and service providers covering cataloging, sourcing, and inventory management and finally this will be followed by implementation workshops on Thursday. The ISO meeting runs from Sunday October 22nd 2006 through Friday October 27th 2006 and the ECCMA conference and exhibition will be on Wednesday October 25th 2006 and Thursday October 26th 2006 both events will be held at the Hotel Hershey. If you are planning on attending, please keep in mind that hotel accommodation at the Hotel Hershey is limited so please book early to ensure you receive the ECCMA rate.
Respectfully submitted,
Peter Benson
Executive Director, ECCMA
ECCMA Research Laboratory
Donald Hillman, Lehigh University
The ECCMA Research Laboratory at Lehigh University conducts research and development activities pertinent to the ECCMA mission. Faculty members and graduate students in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering are involved in projects that are foundational to e-commerce. These include search engine technology, innovative information retrieval methods, database systems, and networking. Of recent interest is a new project in disruption tolerant networking, whereby communications can be established and performed under conditions in which end-to-end communications are difficult to achieve. This represents an advance over the secure Internet Protocol (IP) that forms the basis of Internet communications but which can be disturbed by unexpected network events. The reliability and security of network communications are at the heart of e-commerce.
Other ongoing projects deal with developing ontologies for different classification and coding systems to permit efficient mapping among them. This work derives from Semantic Web developments. Another project is concerned with the analysis of visitors to Web sites to determine patterns of usage and interest.
Our participation in the work of integrating cataloging with CAD/CAM operations has led to the development of a procedure for contructing eOTD names in a “canonical form”. These are names in a format that is computer-understandable by means of explicit processing rules. It is anticipated that canonical form names will greatly expedite computer searches by removing the need for expensive natural language processing to disambiguate product designators.
If you have a project that has research potential, please contact Dr. Donald Hillman, ECCMA Lab Director, at djh3@lehigh.edu.
ECCMA Introduces Web Services
Doug Erickson, PartNET
Until now, accessing the eOTD to standardize your cataloging process has been a time-consuming task. The eOTD database files needed to be downloaded and then converted into a form usable by your application. Keeping the local copy of the eOTD up-to-date by repeatedly downloading, extracting, and converting the database files to the required format can quickly become a chore. ECCMA is now developing a collection of “Web Services” – interfaces that give your applications instant access to various ECCMA databases, to make it easy to automate this and similar processes.
Use of these web services currently requires some programming ability, but they are designed to be easy to integrate into other applications. In fact, the ability to discover and integrate with web services is becoming a common feature of many desktop applications such as Microsoft Office.
If you are developing eOTD-enabled software, please consider helping test ECCMA web services. As a “beta-tester,” you can help improve these interfaces while quickly developing a detailed knowledge of ECCMA standards and practices. For more information, contact Doug Erickson at doug.erickson@part.net.
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