A Hilton wrote:
> Ken, you asked for it...
OK. Full marks for detail. :-).
By giving more detail, it now is possible to see you are talking
about something quite different to the subject of the discussion
you are responding to.
You are talking essentially about the internal use of data once it
has been received and processed. You have shown how simple it can
be for you to support a client organisation who wants to produce
different views of the same (internal) data for different purposes.
In this area there are no problems with different semantics or different
concepts/data contents to contend with. The situations you describe all
occur within ONE single business system. That is not what EDI is used
for or what B2B is generally used to describe.
I agree that in the area you have detailed, XML/XSL is one possibility
for handling multiple views of the same data.
The thread you contributed to was talking about the interoperation
of differently designed business processes. Here the great variations
in semantics and transaction concepts/attributes of remote business
systems must be accommodated and resolved prior to that data being
available to a receiving business system for presentation in the
different views you have described. This is the interoperation problem
traditional EDI, BSI and the various kinds of manually driven adaptors
are solving with varying degrees of success.
The situations you describe are all involved with displaying
information on a screen for a person to read. Interoperation
involves the automated interaction of dissimilar business
processes to achieve a specific business result. There are
no humans involved in this operation and browsers or visual
displays just hinder or obstruct.
Nobody has yet shown how XML can solve the interoperation problem on
its own. It must be remembered that XML is only a data syntaxing
method (ie a Markup Language). XML can be used, however, to format
the transaction attributes used by the interoperation methods such
as those listed above. As such though, XML really is just adding
another level of complexity and more importantly, cost, (compared
to simpler and truly standard file syntaxing techniques) without
contributing any benefit for the end user to offset that additional
complexity and cost.
--
Ken Steel
ICARIS Services
Brussels and Melbourne
Research results: http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/research/icaris
[EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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