For over ten years, RivCom has managed the content and publishing processes for the business process models of a major global corporation. Since the publication of the XML standard in 1998, XML-based technologies have been at the core of the systems used to deliver the models to users on the web. Two years ago, data was migrated from a dedicated structure to XTM (XML Topic Maps). This move was driven for a desire for greater flexibility to evolve systems over time as needs changed, and to integrate more easily with other enterprise applications. This application itself was at this time based on an XSLT-driven processing pipeline, generating static HTML pages from the XTM, with source data derived from MS Excel spreadsheets. While this was stable and easily configurable, the overhead of each publishing cycle became too high for the increasingly frequent updates to the business process models which the system was being required to deliver. The application also required specialist management, and a key issue for the client was their dependence on an external supplier for this expertise.

In 2003, a project was commissioned to develop the application further, with the twin goals of bringing management of the publishing process wholly within the client company, and giving the creators of business process models the ability to develop and edit models online, and in a web-based editing environment which mirrored the final published site. Following technology option evaluation, a decision was made to develop the new application using a J2EE-compliant topic map engine, and the Ontopia OKS was selected for the task. This approach reflected the desire to build on the existing infrastructure and to re-use current code wherever possible. An additional factor was the anticipated lower total cost of ownership and ease of maintenance than alternative options, with almost all application code held in JSPs and XSLT. Development of the application was completed in 2003, with migration to the corporate eHosting environment taking place in early 2004. It is deployed on WebSphere 5.0, with data storage in an Oracle 9i database.

The case study presentation describes the application development process and background in detail, covering in particular: