Notes from Eric S. Chan’s overview of ICOM for the CMIS TC Meeting on May 3rd. Peter Saint-Andre (representing Cisco Systems, a corporate member of ICOM TC) was also present at the CMIS TC Meeting. Eric cordially invites the CMIS TC members to join the ICOM TC. ICOM TC welcomes closer interaction with the CMIS TC to complement and leverage from each other. Objective of ICOM TC ICOM TC’s objective is to standardize the classes, attributes, and operations for a wide range of collaboration activities. • Focus on standardizing the domain model which can be used in other standards. • ICOM is concomitantly defined in UML and RDF (language neutral). • ICOM TC members may initiate related TC's for protocol and language bindings for ICOM. The progresses of the ICOM TC are documented in http://wiki.oasis-open.org/icom. Motivation ICOM standards can help to overcome the technology fragmentations: • fill the gaps and reduce fragmentation of collaboration tools. • enable common clients to interoperate with collaboration platforms from multiple vendors to support a broad range of collaboration activities. • enable integration of collaboration artifacts across repositories, platforms, protocols, or services. • enable relevance ranking, faceted search, and relational navigation via linked-data across sites. • enable contextual collaboration in Enterprise Business Applications. • facilitate Enterprise 2.0 by enabling the artifacts in unstructured collaboration activities to intersect with the business objects in structured business processes. Benefits David Choy and several TC members proposed “Browser Binding” as an important focus area for CMIS 2.0 and beyond. ICOM standards can lend the bindings of CMIS generic domain model to the collaboration domain model and to a domain specific API. • use a rich set of well-define classes and attributes (concepts) to support complex interactions using basic CRUD operations (require fewer specialized verbs or operations). • simplify the development of applications, especially for rich client applications and intermittently connected mobile applications. • ontology is amenable for rule based applications and software agents. For example, ICOM defines the concept of Unified Message and Message Channels. A CRUD operation that creates a Unified Message with channel attributes in the outbox implicitly triggers a process to deliver the message through appropriate channels. A few verbs/operations are still essential, for example the check-in operation to create a new version of a document. Rich clients and intermittently connected mobile clients can emulate version management using the object model while the check-in operation is pending response from the server. How ICOM may complement CMIS ICOM can be a basis for CMIS object type definitions and property definitions to extend the CMIS domain model with the standardized object types for collaboration, social networking, and knowledge management. For example, we can define the Unified Message by extending the CMIS Document object type. This way the Unified Message is represented as a semi-structured model that enables queries by properties (sender, recipients, received time, message flags, etc.), facets, and relationships to augment the text-based search. CMIS and ICOM joint members can contribute the social network and knowledge management model to the ICOM TC, and then extend the CMIS generic model and infrastructure to support the new social network and knowledge management domain model. Some projects build collaboration platforms on content management platforms. For example, DERI (a major contributor to ICOM TC) also contributes to the Semantically-Interconnected Online Communities (SIOC) in Drupal (http://sioc-project.org/ and http://drupal.org/project/sioc). Content management and collaboration are naturally related. CMIS platform can provide management of ICOM domain model for collaboration and social networking, while collaboration platforms can expose their artifacts through CMIS domain model and API.