Challenges and Rewards of Migrating an Electronic Publishing System to XML
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SVG versionTrack: Case Studies, Publishing, Storing XML
Audience Level: High Level View
Time: Wednesday, November 17 at 14:45
Keywords: Break-Even Analysis, Business Process, Case Studies, Change Management, Content Management, Conversion, Database, Electronic Publishing, Enterprise Applications, Legacy Data Conversion, Legal Publishing, Metadata, ROI, Return On Investment
Abstract:
LexisNexis has been an online publisher of legal research data (Lexis) since 1973, and news and business data (Nexis) since 1980. LexisNexis' data warehouse contains over 3 billion documents, all of which have been full-text searchable since the inception of the company.
In 1999, we began an infrastructure project to migrate the fabrication, storage and delivery of our online data to XML. This project was begun with purely strategic goal and no expectation of increased revenue. It should be noted that the project did not include the actual conversion of internal data to XML.
The effort to migrate to XML was complicated by several factors. First and foremost was the sheer overhead of our legacy systems. At the point that the migration project begun, we had been delivering data marked up in our proprietary format from mainframe computer systems for over 25 years. Given the volume of data that we were potentially dealing with, and existing customer expectations for search and delivery performance, moving the data off of the mainframe platform was not an option. This was further complicated by the fact that IBM mainframe systems offered little or no native XML support at the time that the migration began.
Another significant complicating factor to the migration effort was that the XML data needed to inter-operate seamlessly with our existing proprietary data. The customer would not and should not know the base format of the data that they were searching and viewing.
As the migration effort progressed, we were fortunate that our very experienced engineers were able to transfer their extensive knowledge to new platforms, operating systems and programming languages.
We are now in the third major phase of this infrastructure program. Through the achievements of this program and other projects, we are now equipped to receive any type of source data, convert it to XML, index and keyword it, perform offline and online editing, store it in our data warehouse and deliver it to customers.
In this paper, I will present a high-level view of the costs and benefits of migrating to XML and the challenges, rewards and lessons learned from this major effort.
