After months of hard work it’s finally here: omCollab, the Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform that powers MIKE2.0 and our BearingPoint internal collaboration site. We have packaged up Mediawiki, Wordpress and omBookmarks (a fork of Scuttle) into a single collaboration platform that can be used to host powerful online communities on the web or inside organisations. It’s a comprehensive collaboration platform which combines the following features in one single, integrated platform:

• Wiki
• Blogs
• Social bookmarking
• Social networking
• Mashups
• Search

Please see omCollab Homepage for full details.

We have released omCollab to the open source community because we want to build the world’s most powerful open source Enterprise 2.0 platform. We will continue to invest time and effort to improve omCollab as it powers MIKE2.0, the open source methodology for Enterprise Information Management. We hope that we can get the open source community engaged to help contribute to omCollab.

If you want to know where we are going, what features we are planning to build and maybe offer your help to achieve this, please check out the omCollab roadmap.

Finally, if you just want to check out omCollab for yourself or maybe even power your online community with it, go to the omCollab download and installation page

As part of MIKE2.0, we believe we are presenting a unique perspective in the area of standards development. Our approach is to create a collaborative community for the development of standards for Information Management, including those that apply to Capital Markets.

Some interesting work around open source and open standards is developing in relation to market data:

• Market Data Definition Language (MDDL) is an extensible Markup Language (XML) derived specification, which facilitates the interchange of information about financial instruments used throughout the world’s markets. A community is build around MDDL, including a wiki-based development environment.

• FAST (FIX Adapted for Streaming data) protocol is emerging standard used for the distribution of market data. Some of the steps being discussed with the open sourcing of FAST could be seen be particularly beneficial to this standard as it continues to evolve.

With open content and collaborative technologies, it’s easy for these projects to work together and we’ve starting doing this through MIKE2.0 with references to these projects.

MIKE2.0 uses “small world” measures to assess data models (see Small Worlds Data Transformation Measure). The challenge many users have found is that for large models, it is very difficult to calculate these metrics. Thomas Isaksson has created an open source tool and provided the code on SourceForge which automates the process , supporting any RDBMS for which you have a JDBC driver or ERWin (via CSV output). 

We hope that this initiative will further the encourage the adoption of these data model metrics and help demystify the traditional modelling process. Please take the time to use, test and extend this beta code.

The last 5 years have seen a rapid advancement in open source software development. The reason it works so well is that open source isn’t just about freely available code, it’s a different approach to developing software to can leverage a huge resource pool of available talent. In some cases, an open source product may be of higher quality than a commercially developed product.

Open Source Information Development
Open source content development is the other area that has exploded. Wikipedia is the best example of collaborative development of content where authors build upon the work of others to release a product that anyone can edit.

What about open source data? We’re starting to see it too. A great example is the OpenStreetMap project, where individuals are “mapping the world” by building a repository of geodata and point of interest overlay in a wiki. OpenStreetMap looks to form a credible competitor to the government geodata providers – with the costly ones in Europe providing a particularly attractive target. Some of the ideas about what it may achieve in the future are even more exciting.

Software Development vs. Information Development
When developing open source code or information there are many similarities. The biggest differences have to do with commit rights and release cycles. Whereas code is released in cycles, wikis tend to have content changing all the time. This provides maximum value in terms of encouraging contributions but results in instability.

The other issue is that of authorization to contribute. In a code model there are typically controls around commit rights and a test process to ensure the code developed matches the planned specification.

To get more open source Information Development, we think a hybrid model makes sense in some scenarios. This is what we’ve done with the open methodology framework in MIKE2.0 in an attempt to add stability and reliability. While there are certainly some downsides, we believe that in some cases it can provide the best model for development.

Where Else Might it Apply?
The best case for the approach seems to be related to the development of standards as a means for effective collaboration. I can imagine a few nightmare scenarios for open source information development related to personal privacy, but by looking at the geodata providers we may see other candidates - such as credit agencies - that will face competition through a variation of the open model.