A discussion of the ICOM collaboration technology standard proposal (at OASIS by Oracle) and how it could impact Sakai.

1. Sakai and the Academic Enterprise
Oracle’s Perspective
Michael Feldstein, Principal Product Manager, Oracle
Eric Chan, Consulting Member of Technical Staff, Oracle

2. The following is intended to outline our general
product direction. It is intended for information
purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any
contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any
material, code, or functionality, and should not be
relied upon in making purchasing decisions.
The development, release, and timing of any
features or functionality described for Oracle’s
products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A.

3. The Problem Space
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 3

4. What is the Academic Enterprise?
Source of Truth
• SIS
• Data Hub
• Identity Management
• Etc.
Academic Nerve Center Online Learning
Environment
• Business Intelligence
• Data Warehouse • LMS • Google Docs
• CRM • Wikis • Flickr
• Etc. • Blogs • Etc.

5. What Else?
Source of Truth Web-
conference
• SIS
• Data Hub
Email • Identity Management
• Etc.
Calenda
r Chat
Academic Nerve Center Online Learning
Environment
• Business Intelligence
• Data Warehouse • LMS • Google Docs
• CRM • Wikis • Flickr
• Etc. • Blogs • Etc.
Networked
Drives

6. Sakai 2: The Challenge In Microcosm
• Applications are silos
• Sites are silos
• The existence of 23 discussion forums
doesn’t help you build the 24th
• Similar apps can’t share the same data
• Transport support is labor-intensive
• Federation is hard
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 6

7. Sakai 3 Gets You Partway There
• No more site silos
• Reduced application silos
• A REST erector set for building capabilities
(e.g., discussions)

8. But Wouldn’t It Be Great If…
• Your presence indicator knew you were in class in Room 301
• A teacher could add an assignment from her desktop calendar
• The student would get that assignment added to his PIM task
list
• Activities (including archives) taking place in external apps like
DimDim or Google Wave would be surfaced in the course site
• Course sites from a partner school could be surfaced in your
Sakai instance
• Students and teachers could aggregate course content from
several universities in a rich desktop client (PLE)
• You could save not only the end product but all the related
collaborative artifacts of student work to an ePortfolio
• Somebody else did some of the programming work of all of this
for you

9. A New Standard: ICOM
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 9

10. Integrated Collaboration Object Model
Collaborative access to global networked knowledge
• assists humans, organisations, and systems
• with individual, collective learning and problem
solving
• by encompassing multidisciplinary contributions
• enabling increased innovation and knowledge
production on individual, organisational, and global
levels.
Inspired by Doug Engelbart’s original
1962 report of: AUGMENTING
HUMAN INTELLECT: A
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 10

11. Network of Collaboration Entities
Entity Class Hierarchy
Social Network Implicit Relations
Explicit Relations
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 11

12. Current State of Fragmented Collaboration
Applications
Productivity eroded by
• incompatible collaboration tools
• technology driven tools require constant context switching to perform a
single task
• incomplete threads of conversations when users communicate through
multiple channels
• unable to relate, aggregate, and reason about diverse types of
collaboration artifacts by project, task, or metadata
• lack of uniform relevance rankings of search results from isolated
repositories
• soaring costs or technical barriers for integrating silos of repositories
• weakening governance amid proliferation of web 2.0 content silos
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 12

13. Why Integrated Model?
An integrated collaboration model is essential for
• (users) role-aware and task-driven collaboration
• seamless transitions among the diverse collaboration activities
• (developers) application development platform
• custom composite applications,
• contextual collaboration in enterprise business applications,
• enterprise workplace portals,
• new modes of collaboration
• (integrators) application integration architecture
• interoperable standard modules
• canonical data and message model
• model-driven development and integration
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 13

14. Benefits of Integrated Model
Common policy enforcement of heterogeneous contents coupled with an
extended common infrastructure
• identity management
• access control
• governance and record management
• business rules and processes
• business intelligence
• task/project oriented organization of disparate types of contents
• conversation threads through multi-channel, multi-modal
communication artifacts
• classification, tagging, meta-data associations, activity streams
• faceted search and relational navigation
• search and relevance ranking
• subscriptions and notifications
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 14

15. OASIS ICOM Technical Committee Charter
• Charter
• http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/icom/charter.php
• Objective
• Define the classes, attributes, relationships, and behavior of objects for a broad range of
collaboration activities around shared workspace, communication, content, coordination, and social
networking
• Scope
• Specify the normative standards for collaboration objects and operations in UML 2 and RDF/OWL
representations
• Define the non-normative guidelines (architectures and use-case scenarios) for a new workspace
centric protocol to support a broad range of collaboration activities
• Current organizational members
• Oracle Corporation
• Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI)
• Cisco Systems, Inc.
• KnowledgeTree, Inc.
• ESoCE-NET
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 15
OASIS is acronym for Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards

16. Include a Broad Range of Collaboration
Activities
ICOM is extensible and includes diverse classes of objects:
• teamwork (shared workspaces, discussion forums, real-time conferences,
presence, etc.);
• communication (e-mail, instant message, telephony, RSS, etc.);
• content (text and multi-media contents, contextual connections,
taxonomies, folksonomies, tags, saved searches, etc.);
• coordination (address books, calendars, tasks, journals, etc.); and
• social networking (articulated social networks among users, communities,
groups, activities, wiki pages, blogs, recommendations, social bookmarking,
etc.)
Virtually all ICOM objects are entities which are assigned universal resource
identifiers
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 16

17. Shared Source ICOM Prototype Framework
ICOM JPA Framework for Concurrent
Engineering to provide
•POJO classes
•byte code Injection into POJO methods
•attribute change tracking
•distributed transactions
•JPQL parser
Custom Factory Providers for
•DAO factory
•JPQL parse tree visitor factory
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 17

18. Integrated Model enables Federation
Jane’s Personal Learning /Research Joe’s Personal Learning /Research
Environment Environment
Online Learning /Research Environment
ICOM POJO
Federation of LMS
Cambridge
University Georgia Tech UC Davis
LMS LMS Provider LMS Provider
Provider
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 18

19. ICOM’s Workspace Centric Design Pattern
• Workspace is a durable context and place to collaborate.
• examples of contexts are projects, libraries, personal learning environments, personal
information management, e-Portfolios, asynchronous meetings
• Workspace involves participants with different membership roles.
• participants can observe the presence of other participants in the workspace.
• Workspace contains one or more
• message and document folders
• address books
• calendars, task lists
• web conferences, chat rooms
• wiki pages, forums, etc.
• Workspace is an integration hub for multi-vendor
• collaboration services
• content repositories
• metadata facilities
• infrastructure
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 19

20. ICOM Intersects Enterprise Business Objects in
Application Integration Architecture
Joining structured business processes and unstructured collaboration
activities
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 20

21. ICOM Synopsis
Integrated collaboration object model offers:
• a standard contiguous model for seamless transitions among
collaboration activities
• interoperability among modular services
• unified user experience by consolidated applications in dynamic user
interface frameworks
• common security, governance, and record management
• extended common infrastructure simplifies business/IT administration,
provisioning, and management
• (subsequent TC’s to define) bindings to multiple programming languages
and protocols
• programming language bindings (RDF/OWL, Java, C#, Ajax, Python, …)
• protocol bindings (SPARQL, REST/SOAP, Web Service, …)
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 21

22. Join the Effort!
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/icom/
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 22

23. A Modest Proposal
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 23

24. Consider ICOM for Sakai 3
• For Now: Adopt/adapt the REST API
• You have to develop one anyway
• You get a major head start on design and documentation
• Provides the possibility of full ICOM adoption in the future
• Oracle can provide advice
• After 2010: Evaluate adoption of the object model
• An open source reference implementation should be
available
• DAOs for integration with other platforms should be
available
• Migration should be relatively straightforward

25. Questions?
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 25

26. Communication Workspace
(SIOC DERI et al proposal for ICOM)
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 26

27. Community of Actors and Workspaces
(Oracle Beehive’s proposal for ICOM)
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 27

28. Object Model of Workspace
(Oracle Beehive’s proposal for ICOM)
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 28

29. Community of Spaces
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 29

30. Space of Multiple Conversations
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 30

31. ICOM Folders
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 31

32. ICOM Artifacts
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 32

33. Entity and Metadata
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 33

34. Document
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 34

35. Calendar
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 35

36. Task List
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 36

37. Conference
July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 37