Whilst designing the Edge Architecture I quickly realized that Relationships were a key element of systems going forward. At Spark this was reinforced and in addition I began to understand that it is actually the platform for both collaboration and discovery...

One model that was put up at Spark was Jeff Schneider's which tied together users and organizations really nicely: http://schneider.blogspot.com/uploaded_images/CompetingInterests-729197.JPG

Here is a podcast of Dion at Spark

The main theme from Spark was putting the user (both inside and outside the organization) first. This was felt by all to be a fundamental tenet for the future of IT and architecture by the vast majority of participants, myself included. Interestingly...

Another topic that Nick talked about at Spark was the relationship between Trust and Centralisation, drawing them as two axis to make one of those infamous quadrant diagrams. You can then look at the characteristics of organisations that fit into each...

So I just got the materials back from Spark and was going through them to make sure I had captured everything. One that attracted my attention was a definition of SOA and Web Oriented Arcitecture that Nick Gall from Gartner gave: Service Oriented...

Arrgh, yet again I have been drawn into the "what is an architect" discussion! I knew it was a mistake to give a definition of architecture . Anyway I have been thinking about how to make this clearer because it seems to be such an area of confusion...

Of course they do!! Craig blogged about my architecture definition and said that my definition didn't do much for him as it didn't include design. He focused on the communicate and forecast rather than the modelling elements of my definition. The issue...

Following on from my post about being a Restafarian yesterday I thought this was amusing: http://bitworking.org/news/Hi_REST__Lo_REST_and_Everything_in_between_REST I'm not a Roarchast-REST either, I am a stateful REST. So would all these REST definitions...

Someone told me about this at Spark but it has taken me this long to find the docs: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/specification/ws-roadmap/ Because of the work I did in infrastructure and managment I have been sort of...

Looking back through my stats on this blog I noticed that this is the month I have made the most posts since I started blogging at the end of 2003. I'm dead chuffed. Actually March always is a good month for me blogging, I wonder why?

This rather sums up my opinion of semwebs: The principle of parsimony might better have been called Occam's Chainsaw, for its main use seems to be for clear-cutting ontology And is rather amusing for a dedicated Ockhamist. From the Skeptics Dictonary

I have to write an overview on "What is architecture" for an upcoming website that we are working on and so went out to look at some definitions. The first I remembered was one I used in an old overview of Enterprise Architecture that I wrote in 2002...

Interesting Newsweek lead article . I am on record as hating Web 2.0 as a term but really like the Live Web as a description. I will be using that in future. Also its an interesting non technical and consumer oriented view of what is going on.

Dare Obasanjo comments that Amazon et al are huge "enterprise" applications and so what is all this complexity bullshit that Enterprise Architects talk about. I agree that these web based applications are huge however they are fairly modern designed systems...

I have been following some of the discussion (!) about Ruby on Rails in the Enterprise on http://duckdown.blogspot.com/2006/03/more-thoughts-on-ruby-and-why-it-isnt.html . Lots of interesting discussion which raised a couple of thoughts for me: ...

http://www.optimizemag.com/article/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=180207087 To Quote: Implemention strategies for Web services are splitting into two camps: building enterprise SOAs and exploiting Web technologies. One group advocates using Web...

Ron did a great job of generating some interesting archcasts at Spark. Here is the first of them with David Linthicum .

Phil has posted the Spark at Mix slide decks for me at: http://www.looselycoupled.com/ev/Spark.ppt Thanks Phil!

Interesting article from Zapthink about Web 2.0 and SOA, or as they call it Mashups and SOBA's. The start with the asking if web 2.0 is important for the enterprise and their conclusion? The writing is on the wall: the enterprise mashup is the future...

Blogs about spark so far: Dare Obesanjo's My Website is Bigger Than Your Enterprise Richard Veryard: SPARK Workshop , SPARK Workshop 2 , and SPARK Workshop 3 Jeff Schneider posts and diagrams on SPARK David Linthicum wrote two items ( one...

Anne Thomas Manes, Dion Hinchcliffe and myself presented the output from Spark at Mix to a small but interested audience. I spent most of the day pulling the materials together but did go to Bills keynote. A couple of interesting things that came...

In the second day of Spark Las Vegas we focused on models in the morning and came up with four different models for the architecture of the future which were actually successive refinements of one another. The first was the "Tree of life" which...

Well the end of day one of Spark, the first half day anyway. Its great to meet up with a bunch of smart people who are really energized about Web 2.0, SOA and what is happening in the architecture space. The first half day was about understanding the...

Ron Jacobs in our group runs a series of archcasts which he puts up on channel 9. About a month ago he interviewed me at some unconscionable hour of the morning for a couple of podcasts which he has just put up on channel 9 at http://channel9.msdn.com...