Anil John wrote:
> In my community, which is diverse, distributed and global, an approach
> that has been proposed is to establish communities of interest that
> work
> to define common vocabularies to resolve this dissonance. The end
> result
> of which would be encapulated in shared schemas that would be
> available
> for use.
>
> Another approach that has been articulated is the use of a Mediation
> layer to provide Semantic Mappings between disparate systems. I belive
> both approaches have value and should be applied judiciously...
>
Anil, I agree with this approach. Personally, I think mediation
layers are absolutely necessary. At the same time, I would never
classify them as the end-all be-all solution. As for consolidating
the number of intermediaries, I personally think the market will take
care of this. It may take a while, as there are competing dynamics
of company needs, product positioning, company viability, etc. that
all come into play. No one can deny that there is consolidation
occurring both in the number of vendors and the feature sets within
products. Still, though, company needs may begin with a niche
marketplace, such as an XML firewall on the edge, and then become
more generalized.
As for the idea of working groups, I think this is critical, both
internally and externally. There are many industry consortiums that
address the necessary B2B interchanges, but we also need to adopt the
same type of standards setting process internally, as it is just as
difficult to achieve integration internally. One thing that I
advocate is for companies to embrace the fact that there will be no
one agreed format for all interchange. There may be a universal
model from which the actual interchange models can be derived, but in
terms of the messages flowing at run time, multiple models with all
of the redundancies they bring will be the norm. Effective
management of these models will be successful in the long run.
-tb
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