Distributed Thinking

ClimatePrediction.net will feature on the BBC again this Sunday, in a television programme fronted by Sir David Attenborough. " Climate Change: Britain Under Threat " will broadcast the results of a BBC-sponsored experiment using ClimatePredication.net with a focus on how climate change is and will affect the UK. The results will appear on the BBC Climate Change website after thebroadcast (and will also hopefully be in a Nature paper in a little while, pending peer review!)

Last night Heather Kreger gave an overview of the Service Modeling Language (SML) to members of the OGF's OGSA working group. The high-level view that I took away from this is that SML is a modelling effort based purely on XML (particularly XML Schema ), rather than initiatives that map CIM or UML into XML. The advantage of this is that it has a cleaner rendering; for example, it doesn't have to translate the CIM or UML use of inheritance (which XML Schema doesn't directly support). In practice, models can be rather large. SML also uses Schematron to enable models to be split across multiple documents, while still enabling validation against the models. A related activity, CML, is producing some core models in SML. SML is backed by BEA, BMC, CA, Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Sun, so certainly has industry support. They intend to submit the specification to a standards body in a few months time, although it will be a while after that before it is pu...