In Pursuit of Interoperability

Traditionally, conformance testing has been the domain of the telecommunications industry, while interoperability testing has mainly been limited to the Internet world. Many see these as either/or solutions, ignoring the fact that recent experience shows that both approaches have their strengths when used wisely. This paper discusses the merits and shortcomings of each approach and shows how they can usefully be combined to maximise the effectiveness of the testing process. This is especially relevant where testing is being treated as a potential branding issue by various fora. This paper is based on many years of practical experience of writing test specifications at the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). It presents ETSI standardisation activities on testing, including the development of a generic interoperability testing methodology and the work being done by the Technical Committee Methods for Testing and Specification (MTS), the ETSI Protocol and Testing Competence Centre (PTCC), and the ETSI PlugtestsTM service.

Standardization and Network Externalities

The standardization issue in the ICT industry is mainly compatibility in the presence of network externalities. The compatibility in Economics usually means interoperability between competing products. For instance, the VHS VCRs and the Betamax VCRs are incompatible in the sense that tapes recorded in one format (e.g., VHS) could not be played in the other format (e.g., Betamax). Hence, in the ICT industry, standardization mainly signifies achieving compatibility. Standards can be achieved by mandatory or voluntary measures as well as by de facto standardization. It is an important policy issue whether the government should mandate a standard (or impose compatibility), let the stakeholders (especially, firms) decide a standard, or enforce sponsoring firms to compete in the market, which has substantial impacts on consumer (or end user) well-being as well as business strategies in R&D, technology sponsorship, and competition in the product market. Ultimately, the impacts of standardization policies should be analyzed in terms of costs and benefits of firms (i.e., profit analysis) and the society (i.e., welfare analysis). In this chapter, we suggest an analytical framework to provide a consistent review of theoretical and empirical models of firms’ and consumers’ (or end users’) incentives and behavior under different standardization policies. The chapter is organized as follows. In section 2, we will discuss the Katz and Shapiro model which analyzes how compatibility (or standardization) affects firms’ optimization behavior in the product market and whether private incentives for compatibility are consistent with the social incentive. Section 3 will shift our focus onto the consumer’s adoption decision of new technology over old technology. We will discuss the pioneering Farrell and Saloner model which studies whether consumers’ adoption decision of incompatible new technology is socially optimal. Then we will proceed to introduce several important extensions of the model. The dynamics of standardization process will be explored in section 4. Based on the empirical study of Park (2004a), the de facto standardization of the VHS format in the U.S. home VCR market will be analyzed and further utilized to understand strategic aspects of standardization. Despite recent economists’ attentions to the issue of standardization and network externalities, the literature itself still lags behind reality. In section 5, we will examine ongoing and future research issues requiring further cost-benefit analyses based on economic models. Section 6 will conclude.

Unified Citation Management and Visualization Using Open Standards

Scientific research is hindered when there are artificial barriers preventing the efficient and straightforward sharing of bibliographic information. In today’s computing world, the barriers take the form of incompatible bibliographic formats and constraining operating-system and vendor dependencies. These incompatible platforms isolate the respective camps. In this chapter, we demonstrate and discuss a new approach to unify citation management: the Open Citation System (OCS). OCS uses open XML standards and Java-component technologies. By providing converter tools to migrate citations to a centralized hub in BiblioML format (an XML tag set based on the UniMARC standard), we then make use of XML topic maps to provide an extensible framework for visualization. We take as an example the ACM classification code and show how the OCS system displays citations in a convenient focus and context hyperbolic tree interface. We conclude by discussing future directions planned to extend the OCS system and how open citation management can supply an important piece in our inexorable march toward a worldwide digital library.

Patent and Antitrust Problems Revisited in the Context of Wireless Networking

The author seeks to illustrate some of the ongoing problems that patents present for those seeking to standardize in the ICT field. The chapter illustrates these problems by drawing on patent and international trade disputes surrounding the rollout of IEEE 802.11 family (colloquially, “WiFi”) technologies during 2003 and 2004. It then presents several solutions including the introduction of a more systematic approach to dispute resolution by standards development organizations (SDOs) based around ADR procedures derived from the domain name Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), corresponding changes to dispute handling in international trade disputes and, in the long term, alternation to intellectual property laws to allow for appropriately-tailored standardization exceptions (at least at the level of interoperability).

When is Standardization Slow?

This chapter presents an analysis of the political, marketing, and technical aspects associated with the perception that standardization is slow. A framework is defined to evaluate the rate of standardization in terms of meeting users’ needs.

Beyond Consortia, Beyond Standardization? Redefining the Consortium Problem

This chapter analyzes the rhetoric that surrounds the problem of consortia, that is, the supposed lack of democratic procedures. The social shaping of the standardization approach is applied. Two cases are used to illustrate what is at stake in consortium standardization, namely, the standardization of Java in ECMA, and XML in W3C. The findings show inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the way the consortium problem is defined: The dominant rhetoric underestimates the openness of most industry consortia and overestimates the practical implications of formal democratic procedures. This unbalanced portrayal and sustained ambiguity about what is meant by democracy are part of the meaning of negotiation at work in the actor network. Implicitly, the European network still predominantly defines standardization as an instrument of regulatory governance. This marginalizes the role of consortia. The chapter offers several suggestions to redefine the consortium problem.

Open Standards Requirements

An open society, if it utilizes communications systems, requires open standards. The personal-computer revolution and the Internet have resulted in a vast new wave of Internet users. These new users have a material interest in the technical standards that proscribe their communications. These new users make new demands on the standardization processes, often with the rallying cry, “Open standards.” As is often the case, a rallying cry means many different things to different people. This chapter explores the different requirements suggested by the term open standards. Perhaps when everyone agrees on what requirements open standards serve, it will be possible to achieve them and maintain the open society many crave.