IBM announced new technology to secure “mashups,” web applications that pull information from multiple sources, such as Web sites, enterprise databases or emails, to create one unified view. Mashups are attractive for business use, as they allow non-technical users to gain insight on complex situations in minutes, but as with all Web-based initiatives, security has been a concern.IBM is helping businesses realize the value of these situational applications without all the risk, through a new technology created by IBM researchers, codenamed “SMash.” Short for secure mashup, this technology allows information from different sources to talk to each other, but keeps them separate so malicious code cannot creep into enterprise systems.
In order to give consumer and business users the opportunity to take advantage of mashup technology, IBM is contributing the SMash technology to the OpenAjax Alliance. The OpenAjax Alliance is an organization of vendors, open source projects and companies using Ajax that are dedicated to the successful adoption of open and interoperable Ajax-based Web technologies. A founding member of the OpenAjax Alliance, IBM continues to work with the industry to create standards that will support innovation and wide-spread adoption of Web 2.0 technologies.
“Web 2.0 is fundamentally about empowering people, and has created a societal shift in the way we organize, access and use information,” said Rod Smith, IBM Fellow & Vice President. “Security concerns can’t be a complete inhibitor or clients lose out on the immense benefit mashups bring. The same way you wouldn’t buy a car and then later decide to have the seatbelts or airbags installed, as an industry we’ve learned how to build security into business operations from the ground up instead of tacking it on after the fact.”
David outlines the possibilities more transparent government offers to the public and to business and gives some very good examples of several US agencies that have opened their data to the public using well documented APIs
He also outlines some possible concerns that government organisations may have in regard to opening up their datasets:
Concerns
There are a lot of concerns that can and should be addressed before a transparent government project is launched. Fortunately, there are sound solutions to most of them.
* Concern: Amateurs will just confuse issues
Response: As Jon Udell says, “Those who don’t cite data will be laughed at. Those who do cite data but interpret it incorrectly will be corrected. Those who do great work will develop reputations that are discoverable and measurable.”
* Concern: will violate privacy
Response: there is already a lot of personal information available on the web as well as data theft and inadvertent disclosure by government agencies. This issue must be addressed on a comprehensive basis, and shouldn’t be given as the justification for denying transparent government.
* Concern: releasing and combining bad data will compound problems
Response: No justification! Bad data must be cleaned up under any circumstances.
And offers some advice on how this process could perhaps begin…
Test transparent government behind firewall first
I realize this whole concept of releasing data to the general public is downright scary to many in government!
So here’s a great way to ease into transparent government: apply the same strategy behind the firewall first.
After all, your own employees may be struggling with incompatible data bases, may need to reach across agency “silos” to see if there might be synergies between programs, or they may need to see if plotting various data bases geographically might illustrate hotspots where intervention should be concentrated.
Just as with public transparent government projects: employees from outside a given agency may be able to provide new insights simply because of their differing life experiences and insights.
Also, as more young workers, who have never known life without the Web, join governmental workforces, they’ll naturally ask why tools they’ve used can’t be used in government. This can empower them and tap their expertise.
Experimenting with transparent government on the inside lets you:
* learn more about approach
* encourage inter-agency cooperation
* clean up data
* create your own data visualizations and information mashups before going public.
When launching a behind-the-firewall data visualization site, you need to have the same components as with a public site:
* clean up your data, and establish common formats for feeds: XML, RSS, and AJAX.
* create a single web site for the project, that will allow you to include the feeds, show how the process works, and then aggregate all of the mashups and visualizations that result
* encourage users to create and use tags, so that the projects can be clustered and searched.
From Charles Arthur also in the Guardian (2 November 2007)
The Irish government has dipped a toe into the free data market, making a group of datasets for boreholes around the country available online so that professional users - in particular those engaging in major construction or infrastructure planning - will be able to visualise subterranean structures.
The Irish data (which can be viewed using an interactive viewer) are not yet in the sort of form that could be used to build mashups, by connecting to an online web interface that could be queried by someone building, say, a Google, Yahoo! or Live Maps interface. At present, navigating to the borehole locations is a slow process that requires clicking on more and more detailed map views, or searching for known sites or towns.
But in principle it is widening the availability of data to anyone on the net, including Ireland’s citizens, which must be useful - and the possibility of a web API (applications programming interface) that would let people build their own mashups by querying the GSI’s servers in real time must exist.
Video of Tara Hunt Presenting her talk on Government 2.0 “Architecting for Collaboration” (May 26th 2007) to some New Zealand Government officials and staff at GOVIS and here also are the accompanying slides (hosted on slideshare.net). Its an excellent and inspiring presentation on Government as a platform, discussing 2.0 technologies and their role in enabling engaged citizens to collaborate with government organisations in decision making and progressing government in this new web 2.0 era, the main themes are openness, collaboration and community.
Here also is another excellent presentation from Tara called “Government Next” also available on slideshare.net. I highly recommend anyone who is working in IT in government or is interested in IT and government to watch these presentations. Tara has collected a lot of thought from various sources in addition to her own insights she is obviously influenced by Tapscott and Williams book ‘Wikinomics‘ and Chris Anderson’s book ‘The Long Tail’. She also covers Microformats, wikis and a number of other Web 2.0 technologies. Essentially encouraging government organisations to serve as a platform for the development of business and industry. She calls for governments to open APIs to their data and enable businesses to build new services on top of this data, to enable corporate mashups and perhaps to imagine and deliver new services that the government organisations might never have foreseen. Here are two examples of citizen created ‘mashups’ : Chicagocrime.org and the Irish Dartmaps, although in the case of Dartmaps at least, its creator had to ’scrape’ the data from a government website instead of connecting to a useful government created API.
Overall the case for government organisations opening their public datasets to their citizens and industries using open APIs seems a strong one, and after all, it is the public’s data in any case.
Finally here is the video ‘Day of the Long Tail ‘ which is referred to and presented during Tara’s architecting for collaboration presentation listed and linked above..
US Software Company Serena wanted to promote a greater connection between people. Facebook, which is both free and a great example of web 2.0, seemed to be the right answer. They established a private Facebook group for Serena employees and they built a few simple custom Facebook apps to better enable intranet functions. Now they provide links through Facebook to documents stored securely behind the firewall. Access is just as secure as any other method. Serena employees go to specific people to get relevant information.
Serena also has public Facebook groups to connect with customers and the broader marketplace. Link
