An Emerging Area of Business Integration Specifications - Information Conformance and Related Topics

Emerging standard infrastructures such as Web services provide a critical robust interchange environment for businesses conducting B2B over interoperable infrastructure. With the wide spread vertical industry XML standards that have emerged, businesses have seen even higher levels of interoperability. Still, businesses find themselves unable to utilize the vertical industry standards directly out of the box, and have difficulty in leveraging multiple vertical industry standards and specifications due to differences in both methodology/design and the actual content. Interoperability at the business layers continues to be difficult using a single vertical industry's standards, let alone across industries.

Several advancements have taken place and trends have emerged to help is this area. Advancements in the realization of industry needs for specifying specialized, business-specific constraints on exchanged information payloads have resulted in design principals and methodologies in some vertical industry groups reflecting multi-stage constraint specification. Trends in the emerging area of component-centric designs are showing increased promise. These advancements and trends have exposed needs and opportunities for new integration specifications which can bring consistency across vertical industry groups.

IBM has introduced an initial specification as a response to, and with keen awareness in, these area's of cross-industry issues which are above any given infrastructure used for information exchange, but yet below any given vertical industry. This is the area of 'Business Integration' specifications and standards, which will help provide an increase in consistency across vertical standard organizations and reduce barriers for businesses utilizing multiple vertical organization's standards. IBM's initial specification in this layer is Business Integration - Information Conformance Statements, or BI-ICS, which enables a business to fully declare its required comprehensive constraints on B2B information. Typically, these constraints may have tighter, more specific structure based on a particular vertical standard. Enabling a business to declare, and advertise, its comprehensive constraints for B2B information is a key capability of an onDemand business.

This presentation will review the BI-ICS specification, the motivation, IBM's implementation, and future plans for its evolution. A brief discussion on related potential topics and specifications within this emerging Business Integration layer will be included.