Fraser,
I am a member of a standardization forum that has been designing an
open data model in the retail/commercial banking domain for close to 7
years now (ifxforum.org). This organization has started a similar
effort of building a database for querying, viewing, editing its data
model and generating XSDs. It is still in its infancy, but the results
shown so far are very promising.
Other than cost, the reasons for building a bespoke system instead of
buying were that:
- it's a good learning experience to discover and formalize the
underlying implicit governing rules, practices, conventions or
metamodel of your schemas.
- it opens the possibility of strong governance, by implementing
directly these governing rules, practices, conventions or metamodel in
the edition tool. For instance, in the IFX context, making sure that if
you create a new "object", it comes also with an Id and a Status. This
fixes a certain class of "bugs" before they appear. With a generic XML
schema management system, I believe governance would have to be done
manually.
- it does not tie the system to the particular technology du jour
(XML/XSD): you could imagine one day generating Relax schemas, or code
directly.
Guillaume
Fraser Goffin wrote:
The problem : managing the production, versioning,
consistency, .... of a large number of XML schema (typically for
message based service interfaces) spawned from a core business domain
data model.
Scope: Large enterprise integration, internal and external (B2B)
Any one uses products such as igniteXML, corteXML, or the like ...
We are starting to look into this area 9we are swiftly out-growing the
ability of a small number of talented individuals) and would welcome
tooling and methodology that other have found to be most useful ?
Regards
Fraser.
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