The OEM Digital Department

In order to prove the concepts in a controlled environment, and provide a showcase for our sponsers, the Center for OEM will use the technologies of the OEM projects in a prototype application: The Digital Department will use combinations of OEM project technologies in order to actually operate the Stanford Computer Science Department.

In order to provide all of the envisioned functionality, we will require a variety of technologies, which are outlined in Figure 1.:

Actually doing this will require extensive development in cooperation with other people in and outside the CS department, even if we start with just functions of the Logic Group and the OEM center. However, in a previous project, we have made prototypes, studied what was wrong with existing web service architectures, and have developed further prototypes such as SEAmail.

An example application within the DD might be event planning, as shown Figure 2:

The interface for such planning might vary widely with the purpose, but a simple we created for such planning is shown in Figure 3:

The achitecture for such event planning will require something like that shown in Figure 4:

The service registry in this architecture will be semantic: it will be annotation to standard specifications such as WSDL, and it will allow distributed search, since the WSDL will be distributed in different offices, and, indeed, in different departments, as shown in Figure 5:

These services need not be software: in some cases people may be "wrapped" with service descriptions and the actual communication with them may be email, perhaps via SEAmail.

Part of this vision is based upon allowing each person in the departmental enterprise to establish a personal semantic description, in FOAF or Infomaster. These will be used not only for SEAmail but also as just one more source in the integration of data and semantics for the department.