emergency-if — archive

[Rex Brooks]

Hi Everyone, Don McGarry produced a pdf of a set of Visio files as Use Cases and uploaded them 2 March 2010. http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/emergency-if/download.php/36650/Visio-DE_IF_Use_Cases_v1.vsd.pdf I happened to be out of pocket at the NCOIC March Plenary at the time and didn't notice this until it was pointed out to me yesterday in a call with Dave Ellis. If I had been here I would certainly have asked a number of questions and made a few observations about these diagrammatic illustrations. However, I found myself at a loss when asked how I could support something I had never seen, to which I said I couldn't and it was at this point that Dave pointed me to this file. So this sets up an interesting set of disconnects for me wrt how I want to respond to this as it relates to the ValueListURx discussions in both the Infrastructure Framework and the Reference Information Model SCs. I assume we all know what ASSUME stands for? All puns intended. Now, it looks to me like we have had dueling assumptions, and both sets of assumptions appear to have been asserted and defended without giving the opposing set of assumptions the benefit of the doubt, and both have been argued out of context, in my opinion. For now, in this particular message, I'm going to stick with just asking my questions about this set of Use Cases. I will be composing and sending out a couple or a few more messages where I hope to focus on different specific aspects of this discussion. I will give them separate Subject Lines so, hopefully, we can harvest any further discussions more easily. I've tried this before and it usually breaks down because people ignore Subject Lines which would otherwise serve to collect related discussions in an easily referenced way and react only to specific comments within a message. I don't expect this to be any different, but I keep trying in the hope that one fine day, it will "take." Question #1: What list is it that the user wants to update? This makes an incredible difference since, (in my opinion) IF it relates to the user's social structure; e.g. a change in the permissions (policy) assigned to a given role (job description and title) for a position in Mitre or OASIS or Foo or Bar or The Dept of Redundancy Dept; THEN (In my opinion and in any repeatable Service Oriented pattern I work on) it definitely should not be submitted to the List Server or the Https Server or the Router through any external network In-Band. My opinion (with the understanding that this Infrastructure is only now beginning to be implemented): It should be submitted through the social structure's duly authorized method to a Third Party Registry (possibly a public-private shared resource) or Broker Service where it can be separately validated, authorized and authenticated before being propagated to the network routers where it would be updated system-wide just like DNS. I could argue that no significant change should be submitted In-Band, but I think that for the next few years we can probably allow simple changes in the kind of ValueLists which are aimed solely to document a given jurisdiction's facilities, terminologies and equipment names to simply be published separately and shared among the partners with whom the jurisdiction has mutual aid or other service level agreements. I would envision those lists being shared by municipalities and counties in shared DBs once we educate them to the value of such datasharing. I recognize that this seems like a more heavyweight process than may seem needed, but I think that there is more than sufficient need for verifiable security, financial liability assurance, audit trails and confidence, as well as scalability. Once it is done a few times, we can learn how to streamline the process, and once in place, maintenance should be much easier than most people think. However, it does require practice and making that maintenance a regular SOP. We need to set up 24/7 365 testbeds anyway, so this should help take the sting out of the learning curve, especially if we can use students to do the initial documentation. Cheers, Rex -- Rex Brooks President, CEO Starbourne Communications Design GeoAddress: 1361-A Addison Berkeley, CA 94702 Tel: 510-898-0670