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XML and Siebel Financial Services eAI

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Commercial transactions have always consisted of an exchange of goods and services, and an exchange of documents. EXtensible Markup Language (XML) allows us to implement the exchange of documents electronically. XML is essentially a platform-neutral data format that makes it possible to send messages across heterogeneous systems. Business messaging based on XML is one of the most effective ways to adapt existing application software to support external internet applications. Models are needed for integration because you must specify the structure and content of the message. Without a business content, XML is purely an empty shell.

XML provides data interchange that includes industry-specific formatting, vendor-neutral data exchange, global data exchange, language-neutral, and others. Siebel Financial Services eAI developed an infrastructure that supports the development of industry XML connectors to send, parse, and receive XML that supports different industry standards. XML assists trade to happen between different people—especially international trade because it provides common vocabularies. However, these standardized XML tags across industries are very different. Some industry groups are defining interfaces and services that could be used by industries. For example, insurance has ACORD and banking has IFX.

Siebel Financial Services eAI aimed to provide support for generic requirements across industry XML standards in order to support various Financial Services industry XML standard extensions. Siebel Financial Service eAI goal is to pinpoint the similarities among industry XML standards and thus develop and implement certain infrastructure that supports the development of industry XML connectors implement certain XML standards and messages. In the effort of providing this open infrastructure, several sets of connectors are built based on the standards emerging key roles in the financial services industry. In order to support various financial services industry standards, Siebel Financial Services eAI provides a generic connector called Industry XML Connector, which is the base connector for Siebel prebuilt connectors and Siebel Industry XML Connector Factory classes.

NOTE:  Other industry XML standards can be supported by using various prebuilt Siebel connectors or implementing Siebel Industry XML Connector Factory APIs. For details, see Industry XML Connector Factory APIs and individual prebuilt Siebel Connector guides.

Generally the focus of companies integrating disparate applications are in two areas:

Middleware. Some companies use middleware. You pass an XML document to the middleware and the middleware maps the data to its XML standard document structure. As a result, within an organization you can define the tags and the middleware maps between different organizations.
Industry Standard. In the second area the tags and vocabularies are defined by organizations and companies according to industry standards. This method does not require mapping. Organizations that follow the industry standard framework can talk to each other. Also different applications within the enterprise adapting to these standards can integrate with each other.

Siebel Financial Services provides support for this direction of creating tags and vocabularies defined by industry standard organizations. Industry groups provide document type definitions (DTDs) along with tags and vocabularies to standardize data exchange within specific industries. A DTD defines the legal building blocks of an XML document by defining the document structure with a list of legal elements. It provides ways to extend the message sets to cover different business scenarios. DTD describes the document structure and provides a list of elements for a document. Groups can agree to use a common DTD for interchanging data. An application can use a standard DTD to verify that the data it receives from the outside world is valid. DTD defines messages that encapsulate an industry specific data model in depth. It contains rich sets of data exchange syntax and rules.

NOTE:  None of the industry group standards have been adopted by a standards organization, such as ISO (International Standards Organization), or by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). They are all in various stages of development.

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