Developing Industry Schemas

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To successfully exchange data with your trading partners, you need to come up with a common vocabulary. In an XML-powered e-commerce environment, these vocabularies take the form of XML schemas.

Who creates these schemas? At a recent conference, I spoke about schemas and the importance of building vocabularies for interchanging information between business partners. At the break, a rather imposing man came up to me and asked, "Brian, who does schemas for the auto repossession industry?" The repo man standing in front of me needed to come up with a vocabulary so that his customers (banks and finance companies) could communicate requests for his services. He hoped there would be a centralized committee that would develop a formalized vocabulary for his industry. Before I tell you about the answer I gave him, let me explain the situation that probably led to this question.

Most industries have associations that represent their interests. These associations represent industries in legislative matters, standards setting bodies, and to the public. For example, most commercial airlines and makers of aircraft belong to the Air Transport Association (ATA). Even with the fierce competition between the makers of jets (Boeing, Airbus, Bombardier, and so on) and between commercial airlines (such as United, American, and Northwest), it is in the best interest of all parties to belong to a common association that represents all members and supports them in common issues.

Many years ago, the ATA published Appendix 100 (ATA-100) of their specification for maintaining aircraft. Most aircraft, no matter how different they look on the outside, have similar components. Members of the ATA from both sides of the industry (airframe manufacturers and aircraft operators) came up with a rigorous specification called the Airline Maintenance Manual (AMM). The AMM contained standardized structures to describe the maintenance of common pieces of any aircraft, with chapters on electronics, engines, fuel, hydraulics, and so on. When an airline purchased an aircraft, the airline's representatives could point to ATA-100 in their contract and know they would get documents containing similar structures from all manufacturers.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the ATA embarked on a project to turn that paper-based specification into an electronic one. The resulting specification, ATA-2100, was a set of schemas (using DTD syntax) that described the maintenance procedures for aircraft. The Boeing 777 was the first aircraft delivered (in this case to United Airlines) without any paper documentation. A set of electronic media contained all maintenance information for the aircraft.

NOTE
The ATA-2100 spec is actually defined using SGML syntax, but the concepts are the same as if the spec used XML syntax.

United Airlines buys planes from manufacturers other than Boeing, and requires that all vendors provide documentation that adheres to a common structure. The big win here is that all maintenance data comes from all suppliers in this same format, which United can easily integrate into a single maintenance system. Other airlines followed suit, and now most airframe manufacturers send documents to their airline customers in this open format.

This process has been repeated in many different industry groups. The Independent Insurance Agents of America's Agents Council for Technology (ACT) and the Agency Company Organization for Research and Development (ACORD) have developed a set of schemas that describe forms for submitting life insurance claims, property and casualty information, and other data traditionally communicated in paper forms.

The automotive industry and the U.S. Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) developed J2008, a schema for transmitting emission and repair information between manufacturers and government regulators. Auto parts suppliers and auto manufacturers also use the J2008 spec to communicate with each other. The trucking industry took J2008 and adapted it into T2008, which provides a similar functionality for their hardware.

So the answer I gave the repo man when he asked, "Who creates schemas for the auto repossession industry?" was, "You do." No one knows the terminology and the structure of information of a particular community better than the members of that community. The repo man could hire a specialist in XML syntax. That specialist could facilitate a meeting to help participants look for the data they want to express, and help finalize the vocabulary into one or more schemas. But first the repo man needs to get together with representatives from his community and learn what those information objects are.



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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