HOME >> Open Standards Promotion >> Activities

Activities

 Specific activities of the Open Standards Promotion Center are described below.

1. Development of strategy for International Standards

  • International Promotion of Ruby

    •  Ruby is the programming language which has been invented and developed in Japan and it has already been adopted with a lot of domestic and foreign IT systems.
     To be used in the large-scale systems for government and for the big enterprises, IPA has developed the draft standard specification document of Ruby to be registered as JIS(Japan Industrial Standards). And it was registered as JIS X 3017 on 2011.
     Now IPA is working on registration of JIS Ruby to International Standards.
     If the programming language which has been invented in Japan is adopted as International Standards, as a result, the influence of Japan will be increased and the improvement of global competitiveness can be expected.

    Ruby Draft Specification

     The final draft of Ruby specification document for JIS X 3017 is available.
    http://www.ipa.go.jp/osc/english/ruby/

     Before download the specification, please read through all the terms and conditions of Download Agreement in above URL and agree all of them.

2. Promotion of neutral and fair governmental procurement of IT systems

  • Toward the more fair procurement of IT system

    •  It is requested that the IT system procurement of the government and agency is more fair and neutral compared with the one for private companies. It is necessary to avoid specifying the specific product name or the proprietary function of the specific enterprise.
     However, to procure more fair and neutral, it is requested procurement person to have more advanced IT knowledge and the procurement specification tends to become enormous.
     Then, IPA supports fair IT systems procurement which follows the policy of the government by providing TRM(Technical Reference Model) which is a set of necessary technical intelligence for procurement.
     The content is indispensable for making a neutral specification such as the typical system configuration model and the example of describing functional requirement/non-functional requirement that doesn't depend on the specific enterprise's technology and products.
     A similar approach is taken by EU and it proceeds to create the assessment methods for the technical specifications(CAMSS:Common Assessment Method for Standards and Specifications).
     IPA exchanges information closely with European Commission for the improvement of the compatibility between TRM and the approach of EU and for the mutual collaboration.

    "Technical Reference Model for the Government Procurement of Information Systems (TRM) for 2010(PDF file [7,863KB])" is available.

    "Interoperability Framework for Information Systems(PDF file [273KB])" is available.

3. Improvement of the interoperability of IT systems

  • IPA Font

    •  IPA has been developing the high quality font that can be used free of charge regardless of what kind of system and has been opening them to the public as 'IPA Font' and its improved version 'IPAex Font'.
     For encoding according to International Standard "ISO/IEC 10646", these fonts can be displayed without any trouble on the any system and computer.

  • Research and development on the construction of the character Information infrastructure

    •  In the governmental system, it is mandatory to handle the special Kanji characters which were used for the traditional name of individuals and the shape variation of the same character because it processes the name of human beings for the residential information a lot.
     Those characters were not able to be processed properly according to the restriction of the font, and this has been one of the factors to prevent the update, the improvement and the standardization of the system so far.
     So,IPA has developed the new IPA font "IPAmj Mincho" and has opened it to the public. This new font covers almost sixty thousand characters including standard characters of the basic resident register network and standard characters of the Family Register.
     As a result, it is expected that the achievement of convenient electronic public administrative services for the people approaches further.

  • Evaluation of Service of SOA Platforms

    •  The evaluation service of SOA platforms is the one of the IPA's operating institution according to the METI notification No.60/2008 (The notification of the procedure for IPA's technical evaluation of SOA programs).
     IPA evaluates the program product that the program satisfies the technical requirement of the above notification.
     The user of the program can understand easily that the conformity of the program to the the requirement of this institution by referring the result of the evaluation.
     And the vendor of the program can appeal the satisfaction of the requirement of this institution by showing the result of the evaluation.

4. Establishment of new International framework for the assessment of software

  • Assessment for OSS(Open Source Software)

    •  The reliability and continuance of OSS become more important because OSS has been used already widely as a base of the IT system.
     For the long term operation, not only the reliability of software is mandatory but also it is required that the assessment from various axes such as the ease of maintenance, no existence of legal problem and the support from the development community.
     IPA has participated to QualiPSo(Quality Platform for Open SourceQualiPSoSoftware) network started by the project of European Commission(EC).
     And under the international cooperation, IPA prepares tools for the assessment of OSS.

  • Technical Documentation:

    • QualiPSo MOSST Installation ManualPDF file [873KB]
    QualiPSo MOSST Operation ManualPDF file [1,228KB]