Collaborative Expedition Workshop #24    (41GI)

May 14, 2003    (41M2)

Emerging "Common Utility" Services for Public Discourse and Diffusion of Knowledge    (41M3)

Purpose: To explore the Potential and Realities of Emerging "Common Utility" Services for Public Discourse and Diffusion of Knowledge: Evolution Toward Citizen-Centered Government through the Federal Enterprise Architecture Blueprint. How are new collaboration norms and civic tools broadening how societies' create and preserve meaning together over time? In order for citizens to construct personal, community, and action-oriented views, they need multiple "common utility viewers":    (41M4)

  1. to see their views relative to others;    (41M5)
  2. to conduct the discourse that keeps views "eased" – pliant and flexible relative to achieving the overall agreed-upon purpose; and    (41M6)
  3. to keep views "easeled" – angled and standing in the best possible light to capture the current and proposed shared view as it emerges.    (41M7)

As more people gather together to achieve the creativity demanded by complex national challenges, what will the new institutions of public association, accountability, and standards-building look like?    (41M8)

"Promote then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened." George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796    (41M9)

8:30 a.m.- Coffee and Networking    (41MA)

8:45 a.m.- Welcome and Introduction, Susan Turnbull, Chair, Universal Access WG and Brand Niemann, Chair, Web Services WG    (41MB)

9:00 a.m.- Leveraging Open Components: Collaborative Discovery Tools for Public Reference Works, Sam Hunting, Etopicality, Inc. Using the open source GooseWorks topic map toolkit (tmtk), any reference work -- rules, regulations, statutes, manuals -- can be turned into a portal that permits citizen access to government information. tmtk's unique textbase permits full text search in the context provided by the topic map, providing a unique marriage of precision and recall. For the citizen, information retrieval becomes as easy as google, but as focused as the Yellow Pages. tmtk's query language -- unlike static web pages -- allows new relationships within the topic map to be discovered dynamically. A demonstration portal will be shown, based on the United States Patent and Trademark Office's Manual of Patent Examining Procedure.    (41MC)

9:45 a.m.- Dialogue    (41MD)

10:15 s.m.- Business Process, Enterprise Architecture, Web Services (etc.): Achieving a Coherent Vision, Bruce B. Cox, Senior Advisor for XML Technologies, United States Patent & Trademark Office. Many forces shape IT projects and many voices demand of managers that they document how a project meets internal and external obligations (not to be confused with requirements). Growing out of a project to model the patent examination pipeline at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, the Japan Patent Office, and the European Patent Office, in order find commonalities which would form the basis for reducing workload, the USPTO is developing a tool to capture an abstract process and map connections between the process and systems that support it, resources and services that it uses, rules that govern it, the roles that are responsible for executing it, and the obligations it fulfills. Although still at a primitive stage, the tool will be demonstrated followed by discussion.    (41ME)

11:00 a.m.- Dialogue    (41MF)

11:30 a.m.- Accelerating Partnerships for Sharing and Integration of Agency Capabilities through Applications enabled by FEA Model, Ralph Hodgson, TopQuadrant, Inc. and Robert Coyne, TopQuadrant, Inc. Knowledge Technologies are traditionally understood as ways of connecting people with knowledge. With the advent of web services and the importance of application integration, a new role has emerged -- shepherding the knowledge that resides and moves between systems. Today, successful applications of knowledge technology range from search and asset reuse to semantic mapping and data integration. With a semantic engine based on Ontology Technologies, different stakeholders could be advised on the capabilities available to support the Federal Enterprise Architecture for e-Government. We envision a system accessible through WEB Services that will allow agencies, other governments, businesses, and citizens to make queries about the FEA model, to find and re-use capabilities that support agency services and to assess compliance of their agency business models and architectures with the FEA models.    (41MG)

12:15 p.m.- Dialogue    (41MH)

12:45 p.m.- Who is Here? Who is Missing?    (41MI)

1:15 p.m.- Lunch/ Networking    (41MJ)

2:00 p.m.- Adjourn    (41MK)