Michael A. Sick

The Department of Defense (DoD) Discovery Metadata Specification (DDMS) describes the DOD's preferred approach for decorating data assets with metadata. By providing a common convention for metadata, the DoD is building a common system for asset discovery, search, description, consumption, and security. This article provides a summary of the DDMS's purpose, structure, and capability. Upon completion the reader should have a basic understanding of the DDMS and should know where to go to get more detail and related materials. All questions regarding this article should be directed to Michael Sick at mike@serenesoftware.com. MetadataMetadata is typically defined as "data about data." A metadata specification is an attempt to describe the format and content of a metadata c... (more)

An Overview Of The Java WSDP 1.5

It can be difficult for developers, architects, and managers to keep up with new software packages and releases. This can be especially true with fast moving technologies like Web services. This article provides an overview of the main technologies that comprise the Java Web Services Developer Pack (Java WSDP). For more in-depth knowledge of the WSDP, simply download it and walk through ... (more)

Service Discovery: Perspectives on the Past, Present, & Future

Service discovery and identification is a critical piece of the overall Web services puzzle. Existing service architectures, such as CORBA, JINI, and ebXML, have all devoted significant effort towards making service discovery available and comprehensive. If Web services is to become a ubiquitous platform for service oriented computing, then the industry will need to create standards and ... (more)

Grids, Peers, Discovery, and What's a GAIA?

This month WSJ focuses on P2P architectures and grid computing, two topics that are gaining momentum in our industry. Over the past year or so I've read many excellent articles and books on these topics. However, getting a handle on what P2P and the grid are can be a challenge as implementations advance rapidly, major technologies are converging, and more people are applying these concep... (more)

The Java Image Management Interface

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what words do you use when the picture is in the wrong format? Not exactly a Zen koan, but a valid question whose answer is JIMI, the Java Image Management Interface from Activated Intelligence. JIMI is a toolkit for reading, writing, viewing and manipulating images in multiple-graphics file formats. JIMI supports an impressive number of image form... (more)