Microsoft, Interoperability at XML-in-Practice 2009

I have just returned from a busy two days in the Washington DC area for XML-in-Practice 2009. The event was held in the Arlington VA Hilton on September 30 and October 1. The conference’s purpose is to showcase real world applications and solutions that XML has enabled, enhanced and or made possible. The event was put together by the IDEAlliance and in tradition with the XML Conference, the tracks covered a number of different topics with technical depth and explored issues beyond the fundamentals. The tracks included  the Electronic Medical Records Summit covering President Obama’s Economic Plan,  eGovernment Program , Publishing & Media Program , Applications, Foundations and Interoperability Program,  and a Tools Summit. You can also find the Conference Program.

I wore a few hats at the event, I was a member of the Program Advisory Committee, was a co-chair/track leader of the Applications, Foundations and  Interoperability Program with G. Ken Holman from Crane Softwrights Ltd. and co-presented a session on Open Government and Interoperability with Dan Kasun who leads our US Developer and Platform Evangelism  Public Sector team. The session gave us an opportunity to start a discussion about how Microsoft is participating, sharing our thoughts and work in engaging with Recovery.gov which is built on SharePoint and consumes multiple disparate data sources, interoperates with a number of other technologies, and to share our Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) which complements Data.gov

Keith Hurwitz, our State and Local Government Evangelism Manager on Dan’s team, also participated in the Demo Jam at the receptionhosted by one of our InteropVendorAlliance.org partners Mark Logic using OGDI. He dived deeper into OGDI in a session the next day titled Microsoft’s eGovernment Solutions: Government Transparency and Cloud Computing: Publishing government data in Windows Azure with Microsoft’s Open Government Data Initiative open source toolkit. Keith shared some of the thinking on how it can be used, it’s architecture and demonstrating some good examples, including the OGDI sample site and a visualization by a partner IDV Solutions called Visual Fusion that utilizes the OGDI data. OGDI is a great cloud solution for Government hosted on Windows Azure. It supports calling from a number of different languages including Flash, Java, Silverlight, Google Maps and Bing Maps. It also utilizes some of the Technical Bridges that have been highlighted on this blog including the Toolkit for PHP with ADO.NET Data Services,  Open XML Daisy Translator. OGDI has also been used as a demo in our latest technical bridge published, Restlet Extension for ADO.NET Data Services.

I had a great opportunity to learn a bunch of new stuff and I would like to thank the organizers, IDEAlliance, it’s board, the track leaders and members of the advisory committee, our great speakers and to the attendees for the interaction and stimulating conversation. Special thanks to Joy Donat and Ken Holman for cat herding. I look forward to working with you all again at the next event.  

Jas Sandhu
Senior Technical Evangelist, Interop Vendor Alliance Manager, Interoperability Strategy Team
Twitter@jassand, FriendFeed@jassand