XML for Content Aggregation

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The Internet has increased our expectations for information. Consumers in the past have never demanded as much from businesses in terms of information and help in making a buying decision.

Consider the world of automobiles before the Web. To buy a car, you had to spend a lot of time going from dealership to dealership to compare prices, service, and the features you wanted. This required a lot of time and expense on the part of both buyer and seller.

Now I can go to cars.com, carpoint.msn.com, or any of a dozen high-quality sites to look for cars that have the features I need. I also have access to rich content from various manufacturers' sites, so I can get technical specifications and dealer locations and even take a virtual tour of a car I might be interested in. The Internet has created a shopping environment that relieves me of the burden of driving around looking for a car in the physical world. Of course, I can't test drive a car on the Web (yet), but the information I gather will greatly reduce my time and energy in selecting the right product.

Where does XML fit into this? Consider a content aggregator such as carpoint.com, shown in Figure 1-13. This site gets information from dozens of locations and makes it available to me in a single place. Let's go through a shopping scenario and see where XML would be appropriate.

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Figure 1-13. B2C sites such as MSN CarPoint have a rich business-to-business component because consumers require information from many companies before making a buying decision.

In this case, I'm shopping for a convertible and I want to see what's out there. The MSN CarPoint site has pointers to content on the left and featured content on the right showcasing different cars each day.

As you can see in Figure 1-14, I select the new Jaguar XK8. Nice.

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Figure 1-14. Detailed and varied information is used to create good-looking, data-rich sites. MSN CarPoint collects the information on this page from many different places.

On the page shown in Figure 1-15, I can see a capsule of information about the car, with links that provide deeper information. I'll select information about the engine. I live in Colorado, so I need a lot of power to make up for the thin air we have here.

There it is, the 370hp supercharged XKR configuration. Yes. Let's configure it with options and see how much it will cost, as Figure 1-16 illustrates.

I'll take the navigation system so that I won't get lost on those long trips to the store.

Then I see the damage. Let's hope that royalty check comes soon!

This is just one car out of hundreds of cars and thousands of configurations available for consumers on this site. How does all the data get there? Basically, the option information is loaded into an object on the page that communicates with the site containing configuration data and makes dynamic calculations as I enter data on the page.

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Figure 1-15. Available configurations are displayed, based on information captured from the manufacturer.

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Figure 1-16. Options available specifically for the selected car.

Suppose we wanted to create this site. We could repeat the weather example above and go to Jaguar, and then to Honda, and then to all the other manufacturers. This would be a time-consuming process and probably not worth the trouble for the amount of revenue the site would generate.

However, we are not the only site that uses this information. As in the NITF example, there are many providers of information about cars:

  • Car manufacturers provide technical specifications and configuration options for their cars.
  • The automobile press provides critical reviews of cars their readers care about.
  • Auto enthusiasts such as local and national car clubs or collectors' societies have information about the cars they care about.
  • Insurance companies have information concerning actuarial data so that you know how much your insurance will be.
  • The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and various national governments provide safety information from crash tests of cars.
  • Car dealers provide information about their prices and services.

To get maximum traffic and maximum advertising revenue, a Web site that wants to attract potential visitors should provide as much information as the visitors desire. Such a Web site is targeted at consumers, which means it is a B2C site. However, the information required to build such a site is highly dependent upon the site provider's ability to get the information from all the content providers in a usable way. In this way the site is a B2B site. This business-to-business transaction environment is a natural candidate for BizTalk.



XML and SOAP Programming for BizTalk Servers
XML and SOAP Programming for BizTalk(TM) Servers (DV-MPS Programming)
ISBN: 0735611262
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2000
Pages: 150

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