June Meeting of the Washington Area XML Users Group

[Betty Harvey]

The next meeting of the XML Users Group will be held on Wednesday,
June 16, 2004 at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) at 2000
Florida Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC 20009-1277. The meeting
starts at 7:00 p.m. and usually last approximately 2 hours. If attending
the meeting by Metro, get off the Dupont Circle stop and walk
north to Florida Avenue...turn right.

There is no cost associated with attending but if you are planning on
attending this meeting, please let us know so that we can give a list to
AGU management. You can register at:

http://www.eccnet.com/xmlug/meeting-register.html

Also, if you are interested in the possibility of an XML Content
Management Forum, please complete the survey at:

http://www.eccnet.com/xmlug/XML-forum

June 16, 2004

Tony Byrne, CMS Watch i
A Critical Review of "Enterprise Content Management (ECM)"

"Enterprise " Content Management has emerged as a favorite
buzz-phrase for analysts and software vendors alike. In theory
it holds the alluring promise of connecting, consolidating, and
aligning the disparate information management efforts across a
major enterprise into a simpler and more effective whole.

In practice, ECM means many different things to different
organizations, and early returns from the ECM front suggest
that attempts to implement content management on a truly enterprise
scale have been fraught with great difficulty. In some cases
effective business processes are being sacrificed at the altar of
technical consolidation. In other cases, large enterprise-level
projects are collapsing under their own weight. And in still other
cases, rationalization of vendors and suppliers is forcing
substandard technical solutions on individual business units.

CMSWatch founder Tony Byrne will argue that "ECM" does indeed
hold some promise, and that all industry players can have a critical
role in making ECM a truly useful practice. The two keys to successful
ECM are:
1) successful Enterprise Information Architecture, without
which cross-divisional content sharing and consolidation
are nearly impossible, and
2) successful recognition and application or emerging ECM
design and implementation patterns. Byrne will share
some preliminary thinking on some initial ECM patterns
and invite the XML community to critique and extend
those patterns based on concrete project experiences of
their own.
Ralph Hodgson, TopQuadrant, Inc.

There is a growing Interest in semantic technology. 2004 could
well be a year where this emerging technology moves from the realm
of small pilot projects to serious enterprise adoption. What
justifies this view? Consider first the growing need to reconcile
different vocabularies between new and legacy applications. With
few exceptions enterprises have the challenge of integrating databases,
raising the need for mapping and mediation between different schemas
with different terminologies. Businesses face the challenge of
integrating with new partners and suppliers in an ever increasing
dynamic environment. Mergers, acquisitions, and organizational
restructuring also drive the need for more agility in IT
infrastructure. The future will see enterprises adopting service-
oriented architecture based on web services. When these architectures
extend across distributed systems, efficient dynamic discovery and
correct composition of web services become key capabilities. XML
was not intended to solve these problems.

However, new standards for expressing and interchanging meaning on
the web have now become international standards. In February 2004,
W3C announced that RDFS and OWL (Web Ontology Language) have reached
recommendation status. These XML-based languages allow semantic
differences between database schemas to be resolved through mappings
and inference rules. Several vendors are now offering standard
compliant semantic integration solutions. Early adopters are already
working on projects that will create the semantic interoperabilit y
infrastructure for their companies.

August 2004

Kirstan Vandersluis, CTO and Founder, Xaware

Over the decades, organizations have pieced together computer
systems to manage different parts of the business as efficiently as
possible. Unfortunately, the evolution of this information
technology infrastructure has occurred without an overarching
design, resulting in many stand-alone systems that perform a
single function well, but fail to interact with each other. This
presentation reviews the causes of "informatio n chaos," and
presents various tools and technologies available to solve the
problem, finishing with the examination of the integration
platform developed by XAware, Inc.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kirstan Vandersluis, CTO and Founder

As founder and Chief Technology Officer of XAware, Kirstan has
been instrumental in developing XAware's product suite, leading to
four patent applications, the first of which was issued by the
Patent Office in March 2002. Kirstan's twenty years of experience in
software development spans multiple industries, including financial
services, DoD, semiconductor, and telecommunicati ons, where he has
engineered the deployment of both corporate and commercial software
products. Kirstan's numerous accomplishments with MCI include the
architecture, development and implementation of eighteen call center
applications for MCI's Call Center Services group, design of a multi-tier,
Web-based Local Service Order Collection platform and as Siebel architect,
deploying Siebel Systems on several projects.

At Array Microsystems, Kirstan led the design and implementation of a
chip-level emulator and flowgraph-based environment for JPEG and MPEG
coding and decoding. While with the US Air Force, Kirstan designed
real-time command, control and communications software for US Space
Command, processing messages from distributed sites into a central
application located deep in the secure interior of Space Command in
Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado.

Kirstan often speaks publicly about XML-related technologies and XAware
product strategies and has recently published a book entitled: XML-Based
Integration with XAware.

Currently we need speakers for both the technical and vendor presentation
portion of future meetings. If you would like to give a presentation at
a future meeting, please send e-mail or call Betty Harvey [phone].
Share your knowledge and experience with others.

Hope to see you there.

Washington Area XML Users Group Web Site:
http://www.eccnet.com/xmlug
Electronic copies of papers supplied from speakers are
available on-line.

To subscribe to the Washington Area XML Users Group mailing
list, go to http://ecc05.eccnet.com/mailman/listinfo/xmlusers.

DIRECTIONS:

From Connecticut Avenue north of AGU, make a left onto
T Street (1 block before Florida Avenue). Drive one block,
the entrance to Atlantic Garage North should be on your
right.

From Connecticut Avenue of AGU, make your first right after Florida Avenue onto T Street. Drive one block. the
entrance to Atlantic Garage North should be on your right.

From I-66

- Continue east on I-66 to Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Bridge. This
places you on Constitution Avenue.
- Take a left on 18th Street, NW and head north. Continue north to
Connecticut Avenue.
- Turn left (North) on Connecticut Avenue to Florida Avenue.
- Right on Florida Avenue. AGU is 1/2 block on the right at the
corner of 20th & Florida Avenue.
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Betty Harvey | Phone: [phone] FAX: 9830
Electronic Commerce Connection, Inc. |
ha****@eccnet.c om | Washington,DC SGML/XML Users Grp
URL: http://www.eccnet.com | http://www.eccnet.com/xmlug/
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