One of the most challenging problems faced by enterprises and trading partner networks today is the reliable exchange of information. Industry consortia in vertical markets such as mortgages, credit reporting, pharmaceuticals, and automotive have convened with a single goal in mind: to define how they can share information with one another in a reliable, reproducible fashion. More and more, these consortia are looking to XML and XML Web services to help provide these information sharing mechanisms.

As XML and XML Web services become more pervasive, however, companies and consortia that want to design these enterprise-class behaviors face two hurdles. The first is collaboration: how are the XML documents and XML Web service interfaces for a particular set of inter-process or inter-company requirements structured, and how can various stakeholders work together to create these documents and interfaces? The second is registration: once the documents and interfaces are designed, how can they be exposed to participants that want to take advantage of those interfaces?

In this presentation, we will see that collaboration platforms and registry platforms share many of the same goals. The results of a collaboration process (finalized structures or interfaces) are themselves published as work products in a registry. If a single platform manages both the design of the data structures over time as well as the sharing of those data structures through a registry, then the entire lifecycle of those structures is encompassed by that platform. The atomic level of structure management available through a collaboration platform encourages reuse of those structures, leading to registered XML document structures and XML Web service structures that interoperate with each other as much as possible.

Blue Oxide's XML Collaborator product is the first commercial product that provides both collaboration and registry functionality for the design and sharing of XML and XML Web service structures. It has been designed from the ground up to be as flexible as possible and to promote metadata reuse as strongly as possible. This presentation provides a quick overview of XML Collaborator's architecture and the services it provides.