1	BI-ICS Business Integration - Information Conformance Statements And the evolution toward raising the “vertical.org” standards bar Scott Hinkelman, Senior Software Engineer Software Group / Emerging Technologies srh@us.ibm.com
2	What is BI-ICS Business Integration – Information Conformance Statements (“ICS”) An initial component of the evolution of infrastructure standards toward the business layers
3	What is the Evolution Continued focus on interaction specifications and standards Increases the focus on business-level issues Web services (WS-*) is successful enterprise infrastructure: secure, reliable, transactional But not business oriented “crawling up the stack” off of the infrastructure Help close the gap between infrastructure and vertical content Motivated from the perspective of vertical XML industry consortiums
4	Current Web Services Infrastructure Stack
5	Evolution Principles Focused, composable specifications Consistent with the WS-* approach Facilitate re-use and incremental adoption Avoid lengthy monolithic unapproachable specifications Vertical industry agnostic Focus on cross-industry pain points No industry content Not defining a purchase order, address, travel information, etc Consistent with WS-* Specifications to show a “WS-* binding” Not dependent on WS-* technology Consistent with desire of typical verticals to remain infrastructure agnostic
6	Evolution Target Space
7	Key Approach Points Important to partner with business-level companies, ISVs, and industry vertical organizations to promote specification/standards XML centric Consistent with “vertical .org’s” Cognizant of the emerging OMG MDA work
8	Key Evolution Spaces
9	About BI-ICS The initial step of the evolution A specification - XML vocabulary for a statement about information conformance “Information is stated to be conformant with this type system” XML Schema type system, MIME type, some other type system “Information is stated to be conformant with a process” A Schematron schema process, some other process Extensible Conformance Model Sequence: example-> this schema, then this schema. Or this schema then this transform, etc. Extensible vocabulary Any emerging constraint mechanism Businesses exchange all kinds of information, not just XML BI-ICS facilitates declaring conformance for all kinds of information Simple, powerful Java implementation proof of concept
10	BI-ICS – Use Any Mechanism to Declare your Constraints XSD type system
11	BI-ICS Motivation >The wide-spread issues with business level interoperability within industry-level XML standards consortiums Addresses common issues facing many industry-level XML consortiums (optional fields, etc) The opportunity to increase interoperability at the business level for consortium members
12	BI-ICS Example 1 “The information is considered conformant if of type jpg or gif”
13	BI-ICS Example 2 “The information is considered conformant if of the industry standard schema type and then also my further constrained schema type”
14	BI-ICS Example 3 “The information is considered conformant if of the industry standard schema type and then also my Schematron assertions”
15	What is the Industry Value Elimination of conformance checking in application logic Facilitates comprehensive runtime checking of information in application servers prior to application logic handoff Facilitates an On Demand business A business can declare/advertise comprehensive information constraints for conducting B2B business - based on profiled industry-level content standards
16	IBM’s BI-ICS4J on AlphaWorks BI-ICS4J implementation contains A ‘Conformance Engine’ that interprets the conformance statement and calls appropriate ‘Conformance Enforcer’ objects A ‘Manipulator’ for building/editing an ICS and checking conformance Examples Based on Physician Profile standard from MedBiquitous.org Almost all content in XML Schema xsd is optional Example: at least 1 EducationInfo element is required This is optional in the MedBiquitous standard Schema Examples have 2 BI-ICS Conformance Statements to support this requirement By using 2 XML Schemas MedBiquitous standard schema, and a further restricted version of it By using 1 XML Schema and 1 XSL Transform (via Schematron) MedBiquitous standard schema, and a Schematron assertion rule
17	BI-ICS4J…. It is a proof of concept for the BI-ICS specification Builds on Xerces Xalan JAXB Schematron XSLT reference implementation Function, not performance Shows how the BI-ICS specification is useful in industry
18	Conformance Engine
19	Visual Manipulator
20	Visual Manipulator….
21	Visual Manipulator….
22	BI-ICS Plans Published spec/article/proof-of-concept on IBM DeveloperWorks / AlphaWorks January 04 Currently soliciting feedback from industry-level .org’s and member companies Is this useful? Feedback A spec update likely Potentially with interested parties Interested in evolving the spec? Would you actively support a standardization process to finalize BI-ICS?
23	Links Introduction Article http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-biics/ BI-ICS Spec ftp://www6.software.ibm.com/software/developer/library/x-biics/BI-ICSSpec_v1.html IBM AlphaWorks implementation http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/biics4j