Columbus, Registries, and Helping Discover the World

Setting off on a voyage of discovery into the unknown worked well in the 15th century as a business model. However, today we need consistent, repeatable, and secure processes. The ebXML registry is designed to allow trading partners to retrieve relevant business information quickly and easily about the physical information exchanged. In this case, the information exchanged is catalog data. Companies need to share that information globally so that trading partners can replicate the results and follow the path laid out for using catalog data.

The information structure in Listing 9.1 (see the preceding section) has also been used as the data structure underpinning a Korean Netmarket implementation. Looking at the syntax fragment in Listing 9.1, the unitPrice item has a number of attributes associated with it, and the UID reference "CAT10503" . In the NIST registry, this approach is used with a dashboard control-panel interface that allows the user to easily look up the business information associated with a particular UID reference. Then, as each piece of information is retrieved, the web page display is updated to reflect the new information that's now available to the business system.

The design in Figure 9.5 was developed to allow users to interact with the registry server and retrieve selected pieces of information, and then watch as the visual display of the form changes to reflect the new metadata made available about each business item. The XML content in the lower-left window updates with new XML content for each definition query you invoke, and the form display in the lower-right corner similarly adapts for each new piece of information rule returned.

Figure 9.5. NIST prototype of online registry interface.

Readers can try a demonstration of this system online to see how business information systems using an ebXML registry are able to selectively adapt to user requests . (Links to the live implementations can be found from this book's associated web site: www.ebxmlbooks.com.)

In a live application system, developers can pre-load these rule lookups for the ebXML application system. The business information processing can therefore take advantage of each of these consistent information packets returned by the registry.