Business at XML 2002
by Alan Kotok
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Pages: 1, 2
Government Integration
Many of the business sessions talked about ways XML can help companies better share data among different applications and vendors, a use of XML particularly suited to web services. Don Box of Microsoft, one of the general session speakers and an author of the original SOAP specification, discussed the tension between business-to-business or inter-organizational architecture on one hand and integration architectures on the other. The inter-organizational architecture uses a coarse-grained, loosely-coupled model, reflecting the Internet and Web. The enterprise integration architecture was meant to stay within organization boundaries and requires a tighter coordination.
One of the track sessions later in the day reflected this tension between internal integration and business-to-business exchanges, almost as Box had described it. Al Gough of AMS discussed an API based on XML and web services designed for DoD procurement. Kevin Mitchell of Agogo Networks, who also worked on the project, gave part of the talk.
AMS had already developed a procurement API for DoD but needed to open up the architecture to make it more suitable for department-wide use and public interactions. The original architecture used tightly-coupled components, but the public API specified a more open and standards-based design, directly usable without special tools. As with any DoD systems, this API needed to be scalable and secure, supporting PKI for encryption. And AMS required that the payloads use XML.
Gough said these requirements suggested a web services solution. Besides supporting an open and standards-based architecture, web services also allowed for clean deliveries of the XML payloads. Gough explained how the architecture used a series of layers, but designed the different layers to interact with each other, allowing for direct exchanges among the components as needed.
For example, consumer (non-procurement) applications can interact with the procurement system via either the internal or public APIs, working through an enterprise application integration (EAI) adapter. In some cases, however, the external applications can do business with the procurement system through the public API alone, bypassing the EAI adapter. The EAI layer will allow for integration later on with ebXML or BizTalk. To handle these various contingencies requires a more open architecture than before, based on standards.
Gough said the business payloads are based on XML DTDs and cover inbound and outbound transactions such as requisitions, RFPs, offeror responses, awards, application advice, closeouts, and milestones. For semantic metadata harmonization, the project adopted the Universal Data Element Framework (UDEF) used in the aerospace industry. UDEF helps identify the semantics of elements defined in a schema, such as a vocabulary written for a specific industry. With UDEF, one assigns a neutral code to the metadata, which then provides a means of translating metadata across industries.
A general session earlier in the program showed that for some organizations, even internal integration needs an open architecture. Stephen Katz of the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and John Chelsom of CSW Group in the U.K., a consultant to FAO, talked about the FAO's need to pull together the work of its disparate programs under a single World Agricultural Information Centre (WAICENT). This project, according to Katz and Chelsom, directly affects FAOs ability to help UN member governments modernize their food production and distribution activities.
As Katz and Chelsom described it, FAO had the integration project from hell. Unlike the DoD systems described by Gough and Parsons, where a tradition of top-down command structures can help enforce policies, FAO (and the rest of the U.N.) works in a tradition of consensus-based decisions. WAICENT had to pull together data from 200 different sources generated by hundreds of individual development groups within the FAO organization. But FAO still had to speak with a single voice to the world and could not tolerate a situation where asking the same question to different parts of FAO elicited different responses.
The decentralized nature of FAO meant more than integrating different applications. It also meant reconciling differences in data consistency and conventions, as well as various data storage and publishing formats. Moreover, according to Katz and Chelsom, FAO has no common underlying computing architecture, with some users developing with Microsoft tools and others working in a J2EE environment. And just to make the work really interesting, FAO operates in five different languages: English, French, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic, with Russian soon to be added.
The project team started with an application that FAO calls its Country Profiles. The application draws on several different internal FAO databases, as well as external data sources (e.g. World Bank and BBC) to provide country-specific information on agriculture and development. With this first application, the project team hoped to create a model for quickly and easily developing further web applications and an integration infrastructure that encourages interoperability among FAO systems and information sources.
Katz and Chelsom described the solution as one built on the legacy applications ("solutions that work" as they reminded the audience) using web services. The architects also chose XML as the common vernacular to cut across the various metadata and spoken languages in FAO. They called their solution an information bus that wrapped the various applications in web services and connected them with common XML vocabularies.
The information bus uses a Universal Discovery, Description, and Integration (UDDI) registry to identify internal FAO resources, with a separate UDDI registry for external resources. The solution also specifies SOAP for messaging. The information bus uses metadata based in ISO standards such as ISO 3166 for country identification, ISO 639-1 for languages, and ISO 4217 for currencies to define a common language among the legacy applications.
The solution manages metadata with XML with metadata vocabularies and ontologies stored in a repository. The repository uses RDF to specify the properties for the resources described by the metadata. The developers have as an option the use of RDF Schema and Topic Maps to define the ontologies.
Business Integration
The complex internal environment faced by FAO gave a demonstration of XML's ability to handle complexity, a condition often arising in business-to-business data exchange scenarios. While the XML 2002 conference had few business-to-business case studies, the event had several sessions, both general and track, that showed how XML can address the complexities of communicating between organizations.
The conference had several sessions discussing the Universal Business Language (UBL), which builds on the ebXML core components work and the XML Common Business Library and has in the pipeline a component library, a set of standard XML documents, and an extension methodology. The Accredited Standards Committee (ASC) X12, also building on the ebXML platform, presented a different approach to semantic interoperability. Mike Rawlins and Lisa Shreve talked about the organization's reference model for XML design that provides a framework for electronic documents. ASC X12 is the group accredited by ANSI for electronic business message standards, which for most of its history meant EDI..
The X12 reference model offers a framework for seven levels of granularity in business messages from the complete electronic document instance at the top to single atomic pieces of data at the bottom, called primitives. The reference model's architecture assembles the interchangeable parts into messages, giving the details about parties, resources, events, and locations (the Who, What, When, and Where) that businesses need to provide specified goods or services. Rawlins and Shreve said this approach can accommodate the needs of different industries, yet offer a migration path for the large installed base of EDI.
One of the more common business data exchanges involves interactions for financial reporting, such as between companies and their auditors or even the publication of press releases that can have financial implications. On the conference's last day, Walter Hamscher of XBRL International discussed the use of XLink in the Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL), a vocabulary designed originally for the transmission of standard accounting reports, but extended to cover other business reporting functions.
Hamscher said XBRL is a set of five basic schemas but needs to address business reporting under a wide variety of legal, accounting, and national contexts. Hamscher used the analogy of the basic facts, surrounded by these varying contexts, an idea similar to ebXML core components underpinning UBL and the X12 XML reference model.
XBRL uses sets of taxonomies to represent the various contexts and supplement the basic schema. It needs a way of addressing these various contexts to provide flexibility, while still maintaining the basic documents. It chose XLink. XLink allows the insertion of elements in XML documents to create and describe links between resources.
XBRL uses these XML links (which are richer than the familiar hyperlinks in HTML) to represent the various relationships between basic XBRL metadata and the different contexts. XBRL then stores these links in a separate database, cross-referenced in a series of tables. This use of references and tables allows for extensibility to cover even arcane or local variations (Hamscher cited unusual lease laws in Hong Kong as an example), but without disturbing the underlying the basic schema.
While the technology recession may not be kind to XML at the moment, other indicators point to better times ahead. During the same week as XML 2002, Intel Corporation reported transacting some $5 billion US worth of business using RosettaNet messages, representing about 10 percent of its supplier purchases (see the report on DISA newswire). Those kinds of numbers could bring some of that exuberance back to XML conferences.
- XML 2002 Conference
2003-01-09 09:04:01 Bill Swartz - XML 2002 Conference
2003-01-10 09:35:49 Alan Kotok
