The “Compliance Data Management Service” for the building, construction and related industries (CDMS) is an example of a web and on-site workplace application that has been around long enough to experience the need to evolve to match the changes in underlying technologies. The iPhone and the Semantic Web are about to drive further evolutions.
Below is an overview of the current mobile phone based web application.
This is the second version of the application. It supports work-place activities in real-time using mobile phones with web browsers capable of supporting XHTML-Mobile Profile web applications.
The original version of CDMS was based on Palm Pilots which operated disconnected from the network. The Palm Pilot version requires a manual synchronization step to update the CDMS application database . At the beginning and end of each day the Palm Pilot synchronizes with the CDMS application database via a desktop computer and a desktop application which passes data via a web service to the CDMS web application.
The iPhone
The iPhone represents a new class of mobile devices. As well as setting a new benchmark for ease of use and providing access to both mobile phone and wireless networks, it also sets a new benchmark for mobile web applications, reducing the gap between a standard desktop web browser and the mobile phone browser. In particular the iPhone is designed to support Web 2.0 and Ajax.
Ryan Breen sums up this evolution in his article In defense of Ajax for the iPhone when he writes “… in a few years I expect all mobile devices to provide the same browsing experience. With that, the line between traditional and mobile web development will further blur, with Ajax frameworks helping developers deliver consistent and appropriate experiences on each.”
The iPhone encourages the use of Ajax and simple intuitive interfaces. Adding these to the main CDMS web application is a good thing in itself and starts to bridge the gap with mobile phone XHTML-Mobile Profile web application. In time, as more phones move to equal the iPhones Ajax support a point may be reached where the CDMS web application and the mobile application are one and the same.
The Semantic Web
The current CDMS application is primarily a data island existing within a web of many potential external relationships. While there is currently one web service interface and more could be added, sharing data as XML still does not the relationships and their semantics to be fully expressed.
Some of the limitations of the current CDMS application are:
- users and organizations are forced to create yet another set of online accounts rather than using a single signon facility similar to OpenID.
- the relationships between people, organizations, places and things that are already established outside of CDMS need to be recreated within CDMS.
- CDMS uses its own internal classification schemes rather than utilizing existing publically available classification ontologies.
- CDMS uses an internal representation of standards that need to be complied with rather than linking to published standards (One problem for CDMS is that some of the standards are not currently freely available and not available in a suitable on-line form)
- CDMS uses an internal proprietary representation of organizations and their users
- CDMS uses an internal proprietary representation of a project structure and its tasks.
- constraints which could be expressed publicly within an OWL ontology are hidden internally within java source code.
- geographical location is not expressed in a standard manner.
The document Compliance Applications on the Semantic Web gives an overview of an alternative Semantic Web architecture for CDMS.
Future posts will start to address each of the above limitations.