Introduction

IETC, Information Exchange Technical Committee (subcommittee of IT Standards Committee,  ITSC) is organizing a seminar to be held at Nanyang Polytechnic on 18 March 2009.

The theme for this year is “Cloud Computing and Document Standards”.  This event is jointly organized by ITSC, Nanyang Polytechnic, National University of Singapore and XMLOne User Group.

This one day seminar will feature in-depth and independent presentations, focusing on Cloud Computing and Documents Standards case studies and applications.

It is expected to draw 300 CXOs, senior IT strategists, implementers and technical-minded influencers.
 

Event jointly organised by:
An Industry Partnership Supported by SPRING Singapore and IDA Singapore

Programme Highlights

Target Audience

The event is designed to attract 300 delegates for the one-day seminar. The primary target audience comprises:

C Level:                       CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, IT Directors

IT Professionals:         IT/IS System Analysts

                                    Project Managers

                                    System Architects

                                    Database Managers

                                    Applications Managers

                                    Software Developers

                                    Software Programmers

Seminar Programme

Abstract of Cloud Computing Track

Running on massive data centres, cloud-based computing is a Web-based platform that offers application computing services to boost existing systems or power new Internet-based services and applications. Cloud computing will allow developers to build a new generation of global scale applications.

These applications bring to enterprises the promise of instant deployment, instant scalability and instant 24/7 operation at a fraction of the cost of their current IT systems.

For enterprises, this implies transitioning to a software platform with implications on developer skill-sets, storage technology, computational and networking infrastructure services. All these capabilities are hosted on servers operated either on pay-as-you-go or within premises. This provides developers the ability to deploy applications in the cloud or on-premises and enables experiences across a broad range of business and consumer scenarios.

One of the legitimate concerns of enterprises is whether cloud computing can continue to give developers the flexibility and ability to exploit their existing skills, tools and technologies.  Can they choose from a broad range of commercial or open source development tools and technologies, and access cloud computing services via common internet standards such as HTTP, REST, WS, etc..

The cloud computing platform will imply a new set of interoperability issues at and between all levels of the platform such as:

• Data portability

• Application portability

• Tool choice

• APIs

• Standards

• Identity management

There will be 3 major tracks, with each track focusing on a predetermined issue. These are:

• Data storage

• Programming languages/development environments

• Identity management

 What is the degree of lock-in in the different cloud computing platforms? If so, is there a case for standards?

Abstract of Document Standards Track

The past 3 years have seen a growing focus on raising the standards of documents that address the needs of modern digital computing era.  Today’s users depend a lot more on the correctness, interoperability across platforms, openness, and longevity of their documents than before.

To live up to modern users’ demands, vendors and international standards bodies give their best attempts in delivering standards that meet differing user communities’ demands.  For instance, the Open Document Format (ODF, ISO/IEC 26300) was developed by an open community of developers and users who eventually pushed for and obtained ISO ratification in 2006.  Microsoft, together with several other software companies with millions of users amongst them, offered the Office Open XML (OOXML, ISO/IEC 29500-1) as another document standard that was recently ratified as ISO standard in 2008. Separately, we also saw Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF, ISO 32000-1) being ratified in 2008 as an ISO standard.  Of course, there is also the popular Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML, ISO/IEC 15445:1998) that might seem like also a good candidate to write documents in.

With all these important and widely used document standards available, a lot of user-side questions can be asked. 

·         How can users make full use of such standards effort? 

·         Which format fits them best? 

·         How should they go about selecting? 

·         Are there consequences in their choices?

In this seminar track, we hope to explore these issues with the experts and get some feel about how to extract the most out of multiple document standards.

[last update 19 March 2009]