Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The required interoperability in these situations cannot be achieved by the system
integration approach in which each component is initially designed to be integrated
with other components in the way initially designed. The above situations require
interoperability among data sets, applications, and services that are not initially
designed to be integrated into a single system. Such interoperability requires
federation of objects instead of their integration. The present author coined the word
“knowledge federation” in 2004 to denote the achievement of interoperability among
knowledge resources including data sets, applications, and services, that are not
initially defined to interoperate with each other, without rewriting the code of any of
these resources [4][17]. Later, the word “knowledge federation” turned out to denote
not only such achievement of interoperability among knowledge resources but also
semantic reorganization of knowledge resources and even the social federation of
people's knowledge [18]. We distinguish the first two as functional knowledge
federation and semantic knowledge federation [19]. The third one is referred to as
social knowledge federation.
Our wrapping technologies to extract some portion of a Web application or a Web
service and to wrap it into a pad enabled us to federate Web applications and/or Web
services with other pads. Since both Fujitsu version and K-Plex version of
IntelligentPad could also wrap any Microsoft Office objects into pads, these two
IntelligentPad systems had achieved to provide a knowledge federation framework for
resources represented as pads, Microsoft Office objects, Web applications, and Web
services. Since the extraction and wrapping of various knowledge resources can easily
be performed on demand without any coding, we called such functional knowledge
federation as improvisational knowledge federation.
6
WebbleWorld to Merge Meme Media Architecture with Web
Technologies
With our new framework for improvisational knowledge federation of resources
based on meme media technology, we began to look for its complex applications.
Around that time, we were invited to participate in a new EU's FP6 Integrated Project
ACGT (Advancing Clinico-Genomic Trials on Cancer) as one of the 26 teams. The
participation in EU projects, however, has some regulation. We cannot bring in any
commercial product for system development. Therefore, we made a decision to
develop a fully open meme media system. We also wanted to unify the meme media
architecture with de fact standard Web technologies. As mentioned above, our
knowledge federation of Web resources was performed in the meme media
environment which is different from the Web environment. In order to publish a
composite application obtained as a federation of knowledge resources into the Web,
we need to convert the composite pad to a Web application defined in HTML. We
called this translation “the flattening”. If we can develop a meme media system only
using de fact standard Web technologies, such a system can be considered as an
extension of the Web to the memetic Web. WebbleWorld was thus developed [5]. The
current WebbleWorld exploited the Microsoft Silverlight framework to save the
