I was very lucky in my professional and standards development courier to work for companies and individuals that allowed me to be creative. Below is a list of methods, idea and products I developed that ended up being successful:

Designed the first Micro Processor Controlled Railroad Way Control System in 1980 utilizing the Fairchild F8 processor family.

Created in 1981 the first Micro Processor Controlled Thermostat to control the temperature based on the human comfort curves which take into account, inside and outside temperatures and humidity levels. A year later the first commercial units arrived on the market.

In 1985 designed the first Micro Processor Digital Filter for Geo Physical Instruments that are used to measure ground effect by recovering known VLF wave patterns barred in noise.

Designed in 1986 the first Micro Processor Alarm Clock to wake hearing impaired with special light patterns.

Implemented in 1987 the full Canada Customs import rules in Canada’s first Canadian Software Program that was approved by Canada Customs. During the development process many ambiguous customs rules surfaced that were revised in order to allow decision tree programming. The program was used by 7 of the top ten companies in Ontario Canada.

1988/89, created the first North American Customs Import/Export program interfacing to US and Canada Customs using UN/EDIFACT’s Invoice, Purchase Order, Customs Declaration and Customs Response Messages.

Utilization of the UN/EDIFACT AUTACK (Secure authentication and acknowledgement message) in the Templar design instead of a proprietary solution. Harbinger patented this specific application. This innovation resulted in the IETF developing the MDN (Message Disposition Notice) solution in SMIME Version 3.

Date/Time Segment (for both UN/EDIFACT and X12) that utilized a format qualifier to allow the date/time/period format to be specified at the time of creating a message/transaction set instead of populating the data element directory with hundreds of specific data element types. Defining the concept of “generic” segments and composites for UN/EDIFACT that resulted in a QC activity in 1989.

Concept of repeating data elements at the segment level. This concept eliminated the need to have multi-occurrences of composites, especially since the number of occurrences was not always known at design time and resulted in the same composite to be added later to the end of a segment resulting in ambiguous ways for the implementers. Both, X12 and UN/EDIFACT have adopted the concept as part of their syntax.

Concept of transporting non-EDI Data outside the EDI message/transaction set (ISO 9735 Part 8). This eliminated the problem of embedding large junks of “binary” data inside the EDI data that resulted in problems of handling (extracting and routing such data) by the traditional EDI translator.

Introduction of Business and Information modeling for EC/EDI enabling a trading partner free exchange. This concept has since been included in the ISO Reference Model of Open-edi. Further, it now forms the basis for UN/CEFACT’s future work as well as ebXML.

Introduction of a Unified Methodology for Business and Information Modeling to ensure consistency across all models. Current Methodologies around 1996 were primary focused on the software development cycle. This concept was adopted to for the basis for the UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology (UMM).

Concept of OO-edi incorporating Open-edi, Business Process Modeling, and Common Business Objects in a protocol neutral way.

Recommending to UN/CEFACT Steering Committee to create the ebXML initiate together with OASIS. Taking the concepts of the UMM and knowledge of UN/EDIFACT to merge with XML technologies.

Development of the Business Modeling Methodology (BMM) which integrates a full workflow analysis, document content analysis, and document format analysis through a set of traceable and consistent collection of methods, practices, procedures and rules.

Leading the ISO/IEC/ITU/UNECE MoU/MG “Proof of Concept” project to address the Semantic Interoperability problem amongst eBusiness Directories and Libraries. This project explored the potential to augment existing domain-specific e-Business standards with a common layer of shared semantics, and to provide links between that shared semantic view and more specialized, domain-specific views of the data.