15 February 2003

Web Services in the NHS Stuff happening. 9:43:25 PM     Ecosystem Groove Projects We May Or May Not Ever Get Round To ... Here ecosystem would mean ... opensource ... One that I think would be fun. And useful. And an application of grid computing slightly more meaningful than SETI ... at least so far. Sorry I love SETI, what am I saying! Forrest will kill me this was one of our good ideas, at least ostensibly. But we have too much else to do, to fully deliver a great implementation. So lets Groove it together ... Groove Infectious Diseases Tool Ever heard of the ICD-10 codes? That's shorthand for the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, tenth revision. Or as was, the International List of Causes of Death. Now picture doctors a-Groovin around the world, and filing these ICD-10 codes. At the moment they don't do a terribly good job as far as we can tell - because its laborious, and there's not a huge incentive. In particular, there's very little in the way of useful information coming back.  But with Groove ... with decent visualization tools such as those from http://www.steema.com/ ... with location-based information. Well you could build the more or less real-time worldwide medical weather forecast. Flu coming at ya, better get those jabs. Or moving away, hold that investment. Is that a good thing? Lemme think about it. The argument against I guess is that it would only heighten our hysteria, our hypochondria ... The argument for is that (a) generally speaking knowledge is good and (b) we could apply medical intervention on a rapid and rational basis and (c) observe disease patterns we had never before seen. So far I'm for. I'll dig out some code some time soon. Get it going. Check it in to SourceForge. But only if you're interested! If this project is really stoopid, then hell lets hear a better idea...   9:14:12 PM     Internet Brush Fires More thoughts on the topic of vastly expanding the Groove ecosystem ... when Java appeared the news spread like wildfire. Ditto PHP. Double ditto HTML. Innovation and understanding and knowhow spread dramatically, and these languages took deep root. Whole economies grew around them. In the Groove world today knowhow is scarce. There are few developers who can explain things. And yet this is the most extraordinary distributed applications platform on the planet as Jon Udell rightly says. It is such a wonderful thing to write some relatively straightforward code and get distributed results ... out to the team, out to your partners, to whoever needs it. Just in time and right on the button and relevant to the whole group. So why aren't more developers Groovin'? 8:05:41 PM     We Need More Tim Knips Tim Knip's dramatic impact on the world of Groove and Weblogs is a convincing argument for a much bigger effort from Groove on building the developer ecosystem. Groove is a magnificent distributed applications platform - lets move it onto higher ground. Its time to go pervasive Beverley ... more code samples, more documentation, more tech authors, more resources, many more 'must-be-part-of' public spaces, many more developers required on this beautiful system. 7:40:48 PM     Excuse me, we're not convinced UK's biggest peace protest. 5pm: 1.5m people demonstrating in London, organisers claim. [Guardian Unlimited] Donald Rumsfeld alone would probably account for 0.5 million of these. Why? He's dangerous. 6:16:49 PM     People Love This Tool Groove 2.5. Team blogging Groove founder Ray Ozzie and his teams have always pretended to build application software. But what they have actually delivered are the operating systems of the future -- years ahead of schedule. The XML business Web is only now achieving the architecture that Lotus Notes laid down 15 years ago: message-oriented exchange of semi-structured documents. As today's operating systems catch up with that paradigm, Ozzie is tackling the next set of challenges in Groove: drop-dead simple secure collaboration, presence management, coordination of user and device identities, and ad-hoc group group formation. [Full story at InfoWorld.com.] The scenario shown in the screenshot uses Tim Knip's Groove interop tool -- a Radio UserLand add-in based on Groove Web Services -- to create a genuinely new experience of team blogging. Until now, team blogging has meant that a group of folks post to a common weblog. This setup does that too, but it also does something I find much more powerful -- it synchronizes the inputs to the collaborative process, as well as the output. In this case, the input is the combined set of RSS feeds subscribed to by the members of the shared space. Everyone knows that everyone else is seeing the same feeds. Discussion can grow around items in those feeds, and can take various forms: replies to the forum that receives the feeds, IM-style text chat, Roger Wilco-style voice chat. ... [Jon's Radio] 4:51:14 PM

© Copyright 2003 Neil Finlayson. Last update: 28/02/2003; 14:14:26.