Mashing up MeNtOR
You might have seen a couple of links pop up at the side of my blog, pointing to microformats.org and RDFa.info. I have been investigating and experimenting with the Semantic web recently. This was motivated by finding new ways of making Process MeNtOR more user friendly.
There is a big challenge for deploying a methodology. On one hand it is supposed to be a stand-alone, generic guidance on how to do something (in this case building software). On the other, when deploying it into an organisation, it needs to fit in with that organisation's way of guiding its members.
Often when I deployed Process MeNtOR I found web-sites that provide guidance on a number of existing processes, eg. how to do things like kick off projects. In other places there are tools, either in-house built ones or purchased ones, that imply processes (think governance tools, test management tools, configuration control tools etc).
In those situation you'd then see people using the existing tool website and browsing Process MeNtOR in parallel to get the guidance of how it should be used within the corporate framework.
The usual response to that situation is to look at modifying Process MeNtOR so that it refers to existing terminology or complementary practices. That's great, but modifying the Process MeNtOR website creates a maintenance problem - what do you do when you get that upgrade of Process MeNtOR ?
So while we are designing our Active MeNtOR server, I am looking at ways to add semantic guidance to our product by introducing microformats.org and RDFa.info. Then, instead of modifying the Process MeNtOR website, our clients' tools can refer to our website and in an intelligent manner pull out whatever aspects they require and display it within their own tools .
Take the example where the client uses a resource management tools. In such a tool people can view their task assignments using a web browser. Using the semantic web extensions in our server, that browser window would display next to the task assignment all the relevant links into Process MeNtOR such as task detail descriptions, guidance and links to templates.
Process MeNtOR