The Misguided Silver Bullet:

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• The Misguided Silver Bullet
• What XML Will and Will Not Do To Help Information
  Integration

Author Stuart E. Madnick, MIT
Presented By Eric M. Hunter
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Industry Claims

• New Technology
• Citations
• Rosetta Stone
• a universal way to translate data
• miraculous ways
• Back to Earth
• Same challenges as EDI

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Information Aggregation

• Comparison Aggregators
• Focus on collecting information about products
  (e.g. shopping sites)
• Relationship Aggregators
• Focus on collecting information related to an
  individual or organization (e.g. financial)

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XML Tends to Assume One Context

• Desire tags to be seen the same way by all people
• Reality People see things differently (e.g. old
  or young lady example)

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Multiple Standards

• Standards exist because there is no best way,
  simply a compromise
• Multiple Standards
• Should catalogs use price or cost tags?

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Rich Semantics

• When price is given, what is the currency does
  it include sales tax what about shipping fees?
• P/E Ratio Example
• When was P/E measured?

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Evolution of Semantics

• Semantic changes such as Europes currency
  migration to the Euro may not be incorporated in
  the preexisting tag set

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Content Interchange Architecture (COIN)

• A mediation approach for semantic integration of
  disparate information sources
• Basically a collection of wrappers and middleware
  services

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COIN Framework

• Data Model Language (COINL)
• Framework
• Domain Model a collection of semantic types
  defining the domain of discourse for the
  integration strategy (e.g., Length)
• Elevation Axioms for each source identify the
  semantic objects corresponding to source data
  elements and define integrity constraints
  specifying general properties of the sources
• Context Definitions define the different
  interpretations of the semantic objects in the
  different sources of from a receivers point of
  view (e.g. Length may be expressed as Feet or
  Meters
• Conversion Library with functions

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Context Interchange System
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Summary

• Good thoughts in paralleling challenges to those
  of EDI
• Questions?