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Abstract
XML has become a 'lingua ubiquita' but not yet a 'lingua franca': everyone is using it, but with too many of their 'own', costly, dialects, even within particular enterprises, and without the gains so often promised. It is a standard that risks imploding, unless senior management and IT services step in to impose tightly-defined, semantic, business vocabularies as well as clear policies for the identification and naming of business objects (whether documents, processes, dossiers or other logical objects).
This is not an 'IT' issue but a business assets management issue. The European Parliament, working together with a number of other European public administrations, has developed a management-driven approach to the introduction of the XML family of standards, that is shaping a new "information architecture", in which business objects come center stage. Drawing on work from his book of the same title [Information Architecture], and the experience of IT policy management, the presentation will underline the importance of:
comprehensive and coherent object identification and naming conventions (irrespective of platform or technology), that should not be left to the implementation stage, but rather defined as enterprise policy. The value of the 'Core Components Model' of ebXML and UBL methodology will be demonstrated;
'logical object persistence', by which any business object can be identified and, where necessary, dereferenced to a context-specific representation and addressed by any system or process, without the objects 'losing' their identity within a particular context. Particular attention will be paid to pilot projects that have assessed the value of ISO Topic Maps 'Published Subject Indicators' (PSI);
'object mapping', as a necessary complement to application and business process mapping. Together, the three form a virtuous triangle necessary for building any sustainable long-term information architecture, and ensuring that an enterprise's information assets never become locked into a 'proprietary' XML vocabulary.
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