I am pleased to announce that all the power of zAgile's Wikidsmart's infrastructure and applications are now open source. Now all software engineering delivery teams and executives can easily and affordably overcome the problem of disparate teams and tools easily.
Whenever you integrate content, whether it's point-to-point or else with a service bus or traditional data federation layer, you get the same problem. The content is really only mapping data to data with no intrinsic understanding of the process or context of how the data is related. It's essentially dumb mapping. And it's a tedious, expensive effort that is difficult to measure in terms of ROI. So people simply don't do it. And that's why we still have the mess and an additional reason for software delivery deadlines being missed.
The Wikidsmart platform and applications offer the solution. Wikidsmart's core is a context server based on semantic web technologies. I determined that the integrated ALM solution had to have a number of characteristics. First, it had to follow open standards to be approachable to a wider audience. It had to recognize process, metadata, and context all in one. As I did my research, I realized that the WC3 standards body, led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, was trying to solve a similar problem for the web. They led the definitions for semantic web technologies in order to interconnect content of the world's websites. I realized that some of those same technologies are the ideal vehicle for integration of content across the enterprise. Finally, we determined that our solution should be open source. Semantic web technologies are not yet widely known, and the open source nature tends to encourage people to experiment, learn, and contribute to extending the solution - and eventually adopt those solutions in a much more widespread way than closed systems would have otherwise. I think Big Data technologies like Hadoop and the NoSQL movement have demonstrated that well. So what we have ended up with at the core of the Wikidsmart platform is the Wikidsmart Context Server, which is an ontology-driven semantic framework that integrates content bi-directionally as a sort of semantic bus. It serves contextually relevant content from across the enterprise with the application or tool being used by the team member, or contextually composite information for example for an executive dashboard.
Of course, we are speaking of a paradigm shift in the way we think of content, metadata, processes. We went from mainframe to client/server to the internet. Those were all major changes that were inspired by big pains. I think we all agree that the pain is there in content integration. People are still trying to solve the problem with old approaches. People are still thinking SQL and point-to-point application integration primarily. We believe that open sourcing Wikidsmart will hasten its adoption and make the problem of lack of ALM integration a story of the past. I invite you to download <http://www.zagile.com/3/download.html> today for yourself and check it out.
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