Peter Furniss Consultants

This is a slightly editted version of what was the top-page of the website while I was "Peter Furniss Consultants". I now work for Choreology Ltd.

• OSI Maintenance - Peter is rapporteur, on behalf of BSI, for the "mature" OSI standards - those which are still in some use but not under further development, and whose maintenance has been assigned to BSI. The maintenance is centred on the OSI maintenance website, and anyone with any level of knowledge is welcome to take part in the reporting and solving of defects in these standards via email.
  
  
• ACTranS project - PFC was sub-contractor in this to project partners INRIA and Technical-University Hamburg-Harburg. The project developed a transaction "toolkit" that supported interoperation between various transaction systems and protocols.
  
  
• MTS-OTS transaction bridge - (part of the ACTranS project with TUHH) - the design and implementation of a transactional bridge between Microsoft Transaction Service and the OMG CORBA Object Transaction Service. We are looking for partners to investigate extending the prototype to use in a real application (e-commerce especially).

 
• OSI Transaction Processing - Peter was last rapporteur for the Transaction Processing group, in SC21 and SC33 until the group closed (along with SC33) in July 1998. He was also editor for some of OSI TP commit-optimisation amendments, which were published at the end of 1998 as the third editions of ISO/IEC 9804, 9805-1 and 10026-3. The features of the third edition, including dynamic commit, are described in a paper written by several of the participants and published in SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
  
  
• Open Distributed Processing - Peter is editor of the ODP document "Protocol support for computational interactions" ( now FCD ISO/IEC 14752) as part of the work of the Open Distributed Processing group in SC21 WG7. "PSCI" defines a mapping from the ODP concepts to real protocols, with an annex on the detailed mapping to CORBA GIOP/IIOP.

• Report on IETF RFCs - Peter co-authored a report for EWOS entitled "The Role of Internet RFCs in GII Standardization". It is still available on the EWOS website, even though EWOS itself is not!
  
  
• Minimal OSI - Peter was co-inventor ( with Jim Quigley of Hewlett-Packard) of the "minimal OSI" concept. Among other things in the mOSI activity, Peter authored IETF RFC 1698 and implemented a prototype of the minimal OSI stack.

• JTM - Job transfer and manipulation- was the first OSI protocol I was involved with. It has now been withdrawn as a standard and this has made it possible to put the text on the web. JTM was never taken up, but this was partly because it wasn't understood by many people. Although now clearly history, it contains some elements and ideas that may relevance to workflow, e-commerce, asynchronous messaging and distributed processing of various kinds. As well as the HTMLised texts, there is a brief explanation and scenario on using JTM in restocking a supermarket.