David Webber
SOA Architect
XML eBusiness

Wednesday 2:15pm - 3:15pm

Level: Data Management - Intermediate

While SOA seeks to provide reusable agile services across enterprise systems little has been articulated on the challenges of information integration. How do implementers ensure that their information can be consumed, purposed and reused reliably and securely? We know from the prior ebXML, ISO 11179 and CEFACT work that role, context and common metadata and core component semantic definitions are vital to enable consistent information use. However XML and XSD schema use over the past ten years has not advanced past the capabilities of EDI systems in many respects and particularly in its abilities to support context, role and metadata core components. Coupled to this is the need to have support for business process models and definitions and the document handling across their workflow state transitions. All these are challenges to implementing agile information exchanges that implementers face today. The new OASIS CAM specification standard provides considerable new capabilities for information integration using familiar XML enabled techniques with XPath, XML DOM and xslt based handlers. CAM templates can be immediately created to speed adoption of common information formats, rules and contextual handling between participants and systems. These are vital to allow rapid SOA service integration and reuse. Techniques from CEFACT CCTS, CCMA and NDR can also be leveraged to create reusable and consistent subassembly components. This provides a much more agile and flexible information exchange model that can meet a variety of SOA needs based on the role and context of the service users. Unlike todays XSD based web services that are brittle, static and hard to document, CAM templates allow fault tolerant and adaptive content handling with multiple structures and instant documentation generation. This delivers key support for SOA services and their information exchanges own data services layer needs.In addition support for work on Genericode metadata for reference code lists from ISO and the UN is included in CAM templates so international standard code values can be incorporated and checked.

The available open source implementation of CAM (jCAM – http://www.jcam.org.uk) provides Eclipse editor tools and cross platform validation and handling runtime tools. It also supports generating interactive documentation (iDocs) from xslt scripts along with other exciting capabilities for exploiting the capabilities underpinning the OASIS CAM template formats. The presentation will include demonstration of simplifying and aligning complex interchange schemas such as UBL using the Eclipse Wizard tools and sample exchange XML transactions. Also generating iDocs and how these can be extended to collaborative metadata registry and wiki-based vocabulary uses. Existing developmental work and future directions will be discussed. Participants will take away a strong understanding of how they can quickly and easily leverage the CAM standard capabilities to enhance their own XML interchange needs. Sharing and building libraries of CAM templates in support of SOA initiatives will also be discussed and examples of UBL, PESC, EML and other XML standards domains provided.