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EPA Enterprise Architecture Strategic Planning Sessions

Brand NiemannSenior Enterprise Architect

U.S. EPAJanuary 19, 20, and 21, 2010

http://semanticommunity.net/

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Trends and Drivers• Current cell phone trends show, and a recent survey of experts concluded, that

mobile devices will be the primary connection tool to the Internet for most people in the world by 2020.

– http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/270/report_display.asp – Roaming AQI Application Proposal to EPA/OAQPS from Tim Dye, Sonoma Technology,

Inc., providing location-specific, personalized air quality information, February 9, 2009. http://www.sonomatech.com/

• Enterprise Architecture is evolving rapidly from compliance to solutions to innovation under the new administration’s Open Government Directive and Modernization of Government:

– http://cioslearning.wik.is/2010_Federal_CIO_Boot_Camp – http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/president-obama-welcomes-ceos-white-house-f

orum-modernizing-government

• The EPA Office of the Administrator and National Center for Environmental Innovation are leading the agency for now in the Open Government Directive:

– http://www.epa.gov/publicinvolvement/– http://www.epa.gov/innovation/aboutncei.htm

• Eric Marks’ new Cloud Computing Reference Model could be used in IMPART to perform alternative analyses of cloud and non-cloud computing solutions to the EPA Desktop, Enterprise Tools, etc.

– See Executive's Guide to Cloud Computing at Amazon:• http://www.amazon.com/Executives-Guide-Cloud-Computing-Marks/dp/0470521724

– See 8th SOA for E-Gov Conference:• http://federalsoa.wik.is/@api/deki/files/91/

=10_15___AgilePath_SOA_eGov_October_5_2009_v3_Public.pdf

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EPA EA Roadmap

What? Who? How? Clients

Compliance OMB Business-as-Usual

Segments, etc.

Solutions Program Offices & Regions

Reusable Component Services

Regions 4 & 7, etc.

Innovations Agency & Cross-Agency

Cloud Computing Desktop / Mobile Apps

Alternative analyses, etc.

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NIST Definition – iPhone App Store Paradigm Cloud Computing

=

Imagine that your iPhone Apps and EPA Desktop were the same!

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Tutorial Materials: MyAirQuality• Many people in the United States are

exposed to levels of air pollutants, such as ozone and particulate matter (“PM”), that are high enough to cause harmful health effects, including respiratory and cardiovascular problems. As a result poor air quality contributes to tens of thousands of premature deaths each year in the United States.

• MyAirQuality displays air quality observations, forecasts, and health messages for locations you select. The application displays air quality conditions using the same criteria and formats as Federal, tribal, state, and local governments use. Since this approach may not be familiar to some people, when MyAirQuality is first started it briefly explains the system. In two minutes, you will be ready to see your air quality conditions.

• See http://developer.apple.com/iphone/

Download App: http://www.appstorehq.com/myairquality-iphone-41911/app

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Tutorial Materials: MyAirQuality

Documentation: http://www.softwareforasong.net/doc/index2.html

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Tutorial Materials: Summary

• Google Search from Mobile Device gives Three Options: Cached, Similar, & Mobile Formatted.– These Desktop Apps work well on mobile devices.

• Now that Google and other search engines are reorienting rankings to favor Inclusion of semantics and RDFa, this becomes a very strong argument for Linked Open Data for the government.– This protects and enhances your investment in data by putting it

in the cloud of Linked Open Data so it can be re-used.

• Announcing the Year of Semantic Web Training and Pilots for Data.gov/semantic.– For example, EPA is also using Blackbook 2 and 3 (see next

slide).

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Tutorial Materials: Summary• NSA’s Blackbook 2 and 3 - The Standard in Semantic Web Technology for Data

Management:– Blackbook2 is a project architected by Intervise’s Chief Technology Officer (Scott Streit),

which moved into open source on September 1, 2009. Blackbook2 is a standard for semantic web processing and is currently used, in production or pilots, at the Department of Defense, Dole Foods, and the Environmental Protection Agency, just to name a few. Without changing Blackbook2, merely adding new data, Blackbook2 processes anything from Shipping Visibility Data to classified, analytical processing.

– A web application framework for data analysis, Blackbook2's architecture provides secure support for visualization, transformation, data source integration, asynchronous operations, and is vocabulary agnostic. Application programming interfaces (APIs) exist for plugin components that visualize, discover, transform, extract, enrich, or filter graph‐based data such as social networks. Data sources of many types (RDBMs, Documents, RSS) can be mapped into Blackbook2 as RDF/OWL, either by Ingest or real-time mapping solutions such as D2RQ.

– The Blackbook2 architecture provides asynchronous operations via a message bus backend so that results are provided just-in-time to real‐time users or to workflows that may run for hours. Blackbook2 is vocabulary agnostic: it can provide mapping to a common ontology for all data sources or it can accommodate disparate vocabularies with common vocabulary subsets (e.g., Dublin Core, VCard). Finally, Blackbook2 is accredited for multi-level security via role-based access and provides integrated logging via standard interfaces (JAAS and Log4J).

– Blackbook 2, and now 3, is available free to Federal government employees and is currently running on the NSA CloudBase Cloud Computing Platform. Software, documentation, and collaboration are available at http://rabasrv.jhuapl.edu/wiki/index.php/Main_Page by contacting Buster Fields at hlfield@nsa.gov .