Information and Service Design (ISD)

The Information and Service Design (ISD) program was established at the UC Berkeley School of Information in 2007 to provide a focus for teaching and research on the skills and concepts required by a service-led and information-powered economy. The ISD program runs a Clinic where students gain hands on experience in information service design and consultant practice.

ISD Program

The ISD program works to develop a coherent framework for the study of service by leveraging the School of Information's distinctive configuration of competencies in

• information modeling,
• systems analysis and design methods,
• implementation of Web-based services and information-intensive applications, and
• Internet business architecture.

ISD Clinic

The ISD Clinic has a mission to give students real-world experience in the design, implementation, deployment, and evaluation of information and information systems. We are developing the clinic to

• link instruction with delivering working services,
• insure student projects can be maintained and further developed,
• develop important project management and consulting skills, and
• become valued partners to the university community (and beyond).

Area Overview

• Atom Publishing
• Document Engineering
• E-Books
• Geolocation
• Mobile Services
• Open Scholarly Services
• Web-Based Publishing
• Web-Based Services
• XML and Modeling
• XML Technologies

Projects Need Architects

• Star Architects are not typical
  • they sell brand names and deliver high profile results
  • most architects are more modest and less visible
• Architects must understand how things work
  • a reasonable understanding of the disciplines involved
  • an excellent understanding of disciplines have to interact
  • negotiating between specialists for a good overall design
• Architects are guides
  • they provide guidance for going in the right direction
  • they can tell why this direction is the right direction
  • they can tell why a wrong direction is wrong

Fictional Project: Skype

• Skype started as a pure VoIP application
  • the service is delivered by a native application
  • customer service is delivered through a Web site
• Newer services include chatting and text messaging
  • chatting might not be the ideal candidate for Web-based implementation
  • text messaging is ideally suited for a Web-based interface
• Web-enabled environments often lack text messaging support
  • when there are not sufficient access rights to install the Skype application
  • when there is no Skype version for the environment
  • when the environment's text messaging support is too poor
• How can Skype provider better integration into the Web?
  • provide Web-based services when possible (text messaging, address book)
  • integrate with Web standards (tel: and sms: URIs)
  • design UIs that are consistent across native and Web applications

Project Overview

• Browsing with E-Ink
• HTTP Geolocation Header
• Linkbases
• MPath
• Open Context
• SPath
• XSLidy

SPath

• XML Schema (XSD) is the most widely used XML schema language
• XSD is surprisingly inaccessible
• Schema Component XML (SCX) is a syntax for XSD components
• XML Schema Path Language (SPath) extends XPath with XSD access
• Runtime access to schemas is essential for loose coupling
  • SPath can be used in XSLT and XQuery to work with schema information
• MPath would be next step beyond that: Runtime model access

SPath Examples

/descendant::*[42]/type::*
/descendant::*[42]/type::*/name()
/descendant::*[42]/type::*/declaration::*
/descendant::*[42]/followed-by::*/declaration::*

Web-Based Services vs. Web Services

• SOA is not just wrapping APIs in XML
• SOAP is for services what Flash is for publishing
  • both treat the Web as a transport infrastructure
• REST is about a designing interactions differently
• When is something RESTful?
  • is it necessary that all state is URI-encoded?
  • can presentation state still be managed using Cookies?
  • is there an easy way to define content and presentation states?

MPath

• Ideally, models can be accessed at runtime
• How to map models and XML bidirectionally?
• XPath → SPath → MPath
• Models usually live in their closed modeling worlds
• Schemas often are the connections between these worlds
• Can model-level-annotations make schema use more robust?
• Schemas today are often misused in on of two ways
  1. they are treated as a modeling language
  2. they are treated as a serialization exactly one model

Conclusions

• ISD has been up and running since July 2007
• First round of student projects in Fall 2007
• Find underlying themes and build projects around them
• Educate architects for information and service design