Best Practices - Is Canonical XML dying? - Reply to IC Blog

This posting is a reply to the blog posting on Canonical Model http://www.icmembers.org/blog/zaki/2007/10/5/is-canonical-xml-dying#comments



In general, I agree with the posting on Canonical XML discussion. I wanted to make a couple of additional comments on industry-vertical specific Canonical models and the benefits they offer to those enterprises whose interactions leverage standards based information exchange.



a) implementations leveraging package products that exchange canonical models expressed in XML allow ease of upgrading and/or switching between package products without paying a huge upgrade penalty. This is so in the case of functionality related upgrades that do not alter the service definition and/or the information exchanged. Also, this makes decommisioning of redundant packages easy when this becomes necessary during acquisitions long as the package implementation are all standard canonical XML based.



b) partner collaborations also become easy, reliable and robust when collboration is based on the use of common industry vertical XML representations. Adding more trading partners becomes easy when using standards based information representations and this in turn leads to predicatable interaction patterns and information exchange.



c) documentation that refers to common service interactions that form the basis of that industry vertical when captured in training artifacts enable standardized interpretation of the material. In addition, given that this type of training is transferable between enterprises belonging to that industry vertical sharing personnel among trading partners is also made simpler.

Your comments on the canonical model usage is appreciated.
surekha -