Gene J. Koprowski
February 12, 2001; Page G05
Completing complex business transactions online has been a quest for many in the computing community since the advent of the Internet era. Many information technology (IT) professionals embraced XML as the data format that could take them --- and their companies --- where they wanted to go.
Now, an emerging technology appears to be offering a new, more powerful way to help manage complicated processes on the Net. Called Resource Description Framework, or RDF, the arising data framework offers an adjustable way to structure data using XML to create indices of resources, similar to a card catalog in the off-line world.
Much like grammar establishes rules for sentence structure, RDF uses XML to establish and describe relationships between Web resources, including HTML text, photos, and even other XML resources. RDF technology is making it practical for e-commerce companies to enable clients to reach agreement on contracts, manage shipments and payments, and search for all kinds of information on e-commerce sites, all without the incessant intercession of middlemen.
"The Web is a jumble of content with no inherent index," says Jay Roberts, software architect of The Adrenaline Group, Inc., a Washington, D.C. technology consultancy. "This is analogous to a library with no method for ordering its books. To compensate for this, the strategy to date has been to rely upon private indices such as Yahoo to provide a tree structure and for search engines such as Google. While both approaches are powerful, they also suffer from the need for human or machine examination of the entire content of a Web site."
RDF, however, enables e-commerce sites to publish "site metadata," or large groupings of data, in a known, XML-based format, says Roberts. That permits industry groups to develop RDF schema for their particular domain. For instance, a banking RDF scheme may specify certain topics, like money market rates and loan calculators. Each banking Web site would then publish this information about the site in a freely available XML file.
This technology, moreover, has implications for how sites can conduct business with their customers. Companies building portals, for example, need to aggregate content and catalogs from multiple providers. RDF is at a level above the data cataloging schemas, like XML and BizTalk. Experts say this technology standard will greatly reduce the time and effort required to manage multiple e-business metadata schema.
"In short, RDF is the overall structure that can describe any metadata schema," says Beth Gold-Bernstein, vice president of strategic products and services for ebizQ.com, a White Plains, N.Y.-based information portal with offices in McLean, Va. "In the long run, this will provide companies with a consistent way to manage and retrieve Web information."
Accordingly, this new technology is likely to drive the next generation of Web applications, says Kevin Williams, the author of several books on XML and a senior system architect at EQUIENT, an e-business consultancy in Fairfax, VA. That, in turn, will likely create an array of new jobs that require knowledge of RDF as a skill. Williams gives a forecast of the kinds of projects likely to unfold with the technology standard.
"Say that Company A has a list of names and addresses stored in XML that it wants to send to company B," says Williams. "Using RDF, Company A indicates that the XML element it calls ZIP in its structures is actually a ten-digit United States Postal Service (USPS) zip code. This is done by associating the ZIP element with a 'master' definition of the USPS zip code. Then, when Company B receives one of these XML documents from company A, it will be able to tell that the element company A calls ZIP is the USPS zip code which Company B calls ZIPCODE. This allows Company B's systems to understand --- without human intervention --- the meaning of company A's ZIP field. Normally, this would require a human to look at the two documents and map one to the other by hand. The big win here is that Company B may never even have heard of Company A before, but yet, can understand a document from Company A." And that means Company B can do business with them online, too, without all of the hassles of real-world transactions, like faxing documents back and forth, or fed-exing them.
Other local experts agree about the potential impact of RDF and its ability to make complex online communications simple in the near future. Says Roberts of The Adrenaline Group: "It is foreseeable that RDF descriptions of Web products could become a standard offering of our user interface development and product planning practice groups."
