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Joel Farell, Chair; James Fiore, Dan Rehak, Carl Singer, Valerie Smothers
REST guidelines
Valerie reviewed changes to the rest guidelines. Joel commented that the MedBiq 2 reference required a link. Carl commented that the document looked good. Dan commented that he had spoken with JISC folks, and they are too swamped to respond. The group agreed to release the document.
Web services harmonization.
Dan explained that the MedBiquitous Web services guidelines have been updated earlier this year. ADL is now starting new work updating SCORM. One thing ADL wants is a common set of Web service guidelines for the ADL community. Tim spoke with Angelo of ADL, Colin of IMS, and Simon of SIFA. IMS guidelines are out of date. ADL is interested in getting a collection of organizations including MedBiquitous, SIFA, IMS, LETSI, and others to agree on a common approach. Dan wanted to know if MedBiquitous was interested in being a part of that. There's a tentative agreement to co-locate the meeting with the IMS meeting in Orlando that takes place in February.
Joel agreed that it would be better if we did have the same guidelines. Valerie asked if there issues related to size and technical sophistication of the constituents involved. Dan replied that he did not think so. Many of the issues are basic: versions of SOAP, WSDL, etc. organizations can layer on top of these basic agreement.
Joel agreed that we should stick with their basic assumptions. What we come up with would likely not be much different from what we have now.
Dan added that alternate venues and dates are possible. IMS may reach out to its large corporate members, including IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. He added that he would rather have Joel there. Dan asked if there were other organizations in this space that would need to be there.
Joel and Valerie both agreed that they were open to what Dan had proposed. Valerie commented that travel may be an issue for her. Dan agreed to keep Valerie and Joel up-to-date.
Competencies
Valerie commented that there were technical as well as legal issues that the competencies working group must resolve.
Joel recommended having Tim and Rosalyn come back to the technical steering committee in a month so that the group could review where they are.
Valerie asked about the possibility of having competency definitions within the spec and outside of the spec. Are there technical problems with that approach?
Joe commented that W. STL does not define a way to create a schema, but it allows you to put it in the file or reference one outside document. MedBiquitous could take a similar approach with competencies. If you do it in line, make it this way. Fundamentally it is not a problem to have it in the spec and outside.
Dan questioned how someone would reference the competency if it's defined within the framework. They are seeing more examples where people want to keep things separate. There is no problem bundling the framework and description for transport, but it is harder to reference a competency as a next path that it is to find a separate file.
Joel asked if we have cases where it needs to be very simple. It is a good point about the referencing. He also asked if we would allow extensibility. He recommended digesting the information and coming back to the TSC.