WEB of Services for Enterprise Applications

1. WEB of Services for Enterprise Applications Shriram Revankar, Xerox Fellow Daniel McCue, Chief Technology Officer, Production Systems Group, Xerox

2. Documents, Data and Control management play a significant role in Enterprise Services We propose that the WEB should increasingly provide: Documents: Richer base constructs for enterprise document management Data: Easier ways to manage data and merging of data and documents Control: More coherent and complete control flow for integration and composition of services Web Services: Reduce the gap between an abstract business service and a web service Overview

3. Document Production Solutions and Services Complex, high performance publishing and transaction printers and production class applications and services Business critical documents; usually catering to B2C scenarios Management of document is essential and Control (workflow) management is ‘critical’ Office / Enterprise Document Solutions and Services Office/Enterprise level multifunction devices, Business process services Catering to a knowledge workers’ day-to-day operations and increasingly catering to B2B services Seamless transition between data / content and documents, document security and workflow (control) Internal Information Management Applications Typical large enterprise IT/IM infrastructure applications Data modeling and data transformation, services integration and migration, complex B2B services Web services and Data / Content management are critical Context: Enterprise Applications of our Interest

4. Web has played and profound role in defining today’s documents Document lifecycle management has become difficult Document Intensive Enterprise Services and applications manage document as an active element with state, rights, policies and processes Increasingly the services are getting computerized and automated – mostly using proprietary infrastructure – creating silos of systems WEB can play central and unifying role here by providing some standard base constructs for documents that could be specialized for various vertical applications – How about a Document Management Stack (?) WEB and Documents

5. XML has played and continues to play a disruptive and beneficial role in data management Namespace and schema proliferation management is weak Transformation of data to documents and back, transformation of instances is still very complex Our initial effort in establishing ‘Xerox Namespace Authority’ has had mixed success WEB Body needs to provide better tools and better understanding of the best practices No recommendations yet on XQuery XSL Direction WEB and Data

6. XML Namespace Authority Initiative within Xerox Case Study on WEB and Data

7. Deliver XMLNS definitions to internal developers, external customers and partners, and applications for use in validation using a standard process. Guarantee that published Xerox XMLNS identifiers are unique and follow a common pattern. Insure that semantic overlaps between XMLNSs are minimized. Facilitate the reuse of XMLNSs and their components (i.e., elements, attributes, and type definitions). SMC Decision 01-10-18-02: Agreement that an XML Namespace Registry Board should be established and that a specification for the XML vocabulary be created. XMLNS authority Goals

8. 11/01 SMC and the S&S TecNet (1/02) approves request to develop a Xerox XMLNS Registry 3/01 SMC and the S&S TecNet approve the purchase of commercial XMLNS Registry tool and development of an XMLNS Registry Process. 5/02 XMLNS Registry Process Benchmarking study completed 6/02 XMLNS Registry tool installed on internal server and linked with CodeX 6/02-7/02 XMLNS Registry Process defined; processed through organization representatives and practitioners Historical Timeline

9. XMLNS Authority: Process View Authorize Sponsoring Organizations Authorization Process Development / publishing authorizations Xerox XMLNS Registry Process Internet Xerox/Intranet XMLNS Development Xerox Internal XMLNS Registry Xerox External XMLNS Registry search / browse/ acquire reusable XMLNS Industry Standard XML namespaces make submission visible to Registry Review Board namespace submission package Registry Administrator review notify Registry Review Board of submission accept / unique namespace identifier XML Namespace Registry Acceptance Criteria defer / recommendations Registry Review Board

10. The submitting organization is responsible for acquiring approval to publish a particular Xerox XMLNS externally. Defining a new XMLNS Authorize XMLNS Submitting Organizations Authorization Process Development / publishing authorizations • XMLNS authors use the Registry to insure that their XMLNS is unique; does not have semantic overlap with other Xerox or industry standard XMLNSs. • XMLNS author works with the Registry Administrator to define a unique XMLNS identifier using a standard naming convention. Develop XMLNS Industry standard XML namespaces Xerox Internal XMLNS Registry search / browse/ acquire reusable namespace XMLNS Naming Convention Unique XMLNS identifiers

11. Uniform management of control flow is becoming increasingly critical for enterprise applications Production workflow management and automation; automation of enterprise document process are core part of our offerings today Creating a new service (composed service) by choreographing a collection of atomic services and automating a workflow are critical to our customers’ businesses Support for richer interaction models beyond request-reply paradigm; ability to define and verify a ‘valid business conversation’ instance will be a big help WSCL and BPEL compatibility assurance is not accepted by our internal development community and a merged standard may be needed WEB and Control

12. We are increasingly leveraging Web Services for defining both internally and externally visible services These are described by a collection of WSDL interfaces with little or no standardization and hence very weak ability to do late or dynamic binding (there is a strong relationship between our WEB and Data issue and WEB and Control issue articulated in the previous slides) The gap between Web Services as it is practiced today and an atomic business service we would like to expose is substantial (although WSDL 2.0 makes strides in closing the gap) Stronger service model support will help (interaction models, capability description, service quality, etc.) Rapid progress towards agreeing on a Web service Stack is essential for us to protect the web services investment Web Services

13. Documents, Data and Control management play a significant role in Enterprise Services We propose that WEB should increasingly provide: Documents: Richer base constructs for enterprise document management Data: Easier ways to manage data and merging of data and documents Control: More coherent and complete control flow for integration and composition of services Web Services: Reduce the gap between an abstract business service and a web service Conclusion