Open Formats, Open Information and Future Trends in Software Engineering

Background

We live in a world full of information, some of which is totally useless, some has a meaning, some is important and some is absolutely vital for us. In order to use this massive amount of information and find the bits we need, we must have the means to filter out certain parts effectively. In the world of internet the answer today is Google. We simply ‘google’^a everything using search criteria described in our own natural language. Interaction with practically any other human being across the globe is a reality and networking with other people using social web applications is a natural part of our lives. How do these systems work? What gives them the ability to grasp users and be so effective? In our everyday lives, we don't give much thought to the inner mechanics of search engines or social web sites – we expect those systems to ‘just work’, but for computer scientists it’s a field of endless research and development.

Before search engines became so effective in the very late 1990’s and after the millennium, we used to find the information we needed using internet-directories, which sorted different web-pages and sites into different subdirectories and categories. This system relied totally on the creator of the web site or page having the particular content and the maintainer of the directory to have the correct information in the correct category. In practice, this proved to be an inflexible, limited and difficult system to use, and resulted in outdated directories with outdated information. The solution to the problem was search engines, which at first used simple keywords and a database of indexed documents. Now, the creator of a web page no longer had to report his/her new content into a directory, but instead the search engine crawled through millions and millions of web pages and automatically indexed them according to their content. No keywords are required and we can take advantage of natural language. What data can be exploited in these intelligent systems?

The growing trends in computing today are open information and open software systems. There is a certain amount of ideology behind this, but it doesn’t mean that everything related to software is free in the future, which is a common misconception. In practice, open information access is still rarely available for us and the cause often is in the data itself or in the software. To aid in these efforts, open data formats have been suggested and adopted in software systems and organizations more and more. Data exchange between applications is required in many fields, which gives rise to standardized xml-based formats.

Open source software is another hot topic and the concept has even changed the business models of traditional software companies. European countries have traditionally led the development and adoption of open source software. The Finnish government, for instance, has given a statement which says that in all new software acquisitions for the government, open source systems should be preferred and interoperability taken into account.

In software engineering, the processes and best practices are open for everyone to use for their own needs. Thus, using the best current knowledge and the development of even better methods is possible for anyone. Even though making specifications is quite formal and writing program code is governed by strict rules, the most important tool in the documentation is natural language. Model-driven-architecture is a reality and program code can be generated from UML-models, and vice-versa. So, why is it that we still cannot use natural language to construct programs?