The combination of evolving ICT standards that increase the interoperability between applications and the ever-increasing need for a more seamless access to and exchange of information is a major driver in the OECD ICT strategy. This paper describes the role and use of web services in the context of recent developments at the OECD to improve the accessibility of statistical information. It follows up on a paper presented at the 2002 ISIS meeting about “Improving Access to Statistical Information at OECD in Response to Users’ Requirements” and describes a technology framework – called “dot.STAT” – that has been devised for the implementation of applications that enable easy access to certain OECD reference data. The concepts outlined in this paper have been developed in close collaboration with the Statistics Directorate, specialised OECD-internal groups and task forces 2, as well as members of the SDMX Consortium3.
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BioTeam first became interested in Univa UD’s software efforts after hearing Univa CTO Steve Tueckespeak in Regensburg, Germany at the 2007 Grid Engine workshop. Shortly after that event Univa formally became Univa UD after merging with United Devices. At the time, Steve’s company seemed to be one of the few companies positioning themselves to offer full support and professional services encompassing commonly used open source products such as Sun Grid Engine that BioTeam often works with in the field. Individually these popular open source resources are relatively easy to acquire but Univa UD seemed to be making an interesting effort to become the one stop shop for a fully supported and integrated set of commonly required tools and technology.
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IBM WebSphere Commerce is a J2EE-based product which provides a platform for developers to write an integrated extensible solution that adds value in customer-centric online business. WebSphere Commerce allows developers to customize its functionality according to current business demands so that the integration of specialized business functionality like auctions, third party shipping rate & tax calculation within WebSphere Commerce is possible by using Web Services & XML. eBay is the world’s online marketplace where community of individuals and merchants has equal opportunity to buy and sell new or used goods at fair prices. eBay provides online interface for their customer as well as offer SDK and API (Application Programming Interface) for tool developers to create specialized applications that satisfy business need and market demand of any B2C Stores.
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With the rise of model-driven development, model repositories are intended to facilitate research in model engineering and consequently in domain-specific modeling. Model repositories are central places where all kinds of modeling artifacts (e.g., meta-metamodels, metamodels, models, and possibly transformation models) are stored and coordinated. They can serve as a platform for making available the specification of metamodels to others (typically necessary for domain-specific modeling languages) and for exchanging models, as well as a resource for teaching/learning materials.
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The current pedagogical trend about involving students in their learning is naturally extended to student-centered learning in e-Learning systems. Likewise, instructional designs are developed to enable and motivate students at center stage to learn effectively and willingly. However, from our ten years of experience in promoting an e-Learning system called TIES in higher education, we have realized that an “e-Teaching” environment for teachers to teach effectively and happily needs to be founded as a prerequisite to successful e-Learning.
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Computers—the most powerful dimension of the second or foreign language learning experience since the advent of the teacher—serve as tireless portals to limitless target language models and, more important for the classroom, as tools for activities that draw students together to cooperate on activities that interest them and stimulate their creative language production and comprehension, all while challenging them to overcome obstacles in a complex environment in the target language.
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With Active Directory, Microsoft has provided administrators with a powerful directory service to organize network data and to control access to network resources from a central point. However, “powerful” by necessity also means complex, and the complexity of Active Directory has probably contributed to slowing down the rollout of Windows 2000 and 2003 servers. Initially, many organizations found simply migrating their flat NT4 domain structures into a more sophisticated Active Directory wrapping to be a significant challenge. By now, many have defined their Active Directory Forests, survived an often cumbersome deployment process, and seen their directories mature into efficient tools for centralized administration. Policies have become the levers of network management, and, as a result, Active Directory has become a repository holding extremely sensitive data.
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The Human Interactions in Programming (HIP) team in Microsoft Research applies human- centered research techniques to builds tools that improve the software development process. The joke goes, “we build tools as if software were made by people … working together.” As a human-centered effort, we draw from various research fields including human-computer interaction, information visualization, computer-supported cooperative work, and social computing. The central tenet of these fields is that one needs to understand the user in order to design tools to support them. To this end we have initiated a series of investigations to understand software development at Microsoft. Our research builds on a rich history of research into professional software development practices [1, 2, 4, 5, 6, and 7]. This document describes the process we used, what we learned, and directions for future user research.

METHODOLOGY
We performed two surveys and several face-to-face interviews of developers at Microsoft during the summer of 2005. The first survey contained 205 questions asking how developers spend their time, what tools they use, and the severity of various problems they face. We deployed it to 1000 architects, software developers and software test developers randomly selected from the Microsoft address book by job title. We received 157 responses, though the data presented here includes only the 104 responses from the developers.

Next we performed semi-structured interviews with six software development leads and five software developers drawn from our survey respondents. Each was done by two interviewers, who took copious notes. Each interview lasted about an hour. Most were recorded on audio. To find the themes latent in the notes we transcribed them onto 800 3×5” cards and did a massive card sort exercise.

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