Building Corporate Portals With XML (Enterprising Computing)

Topics covered: Strategic business planning, data modeling, metadata analysis and engineering, XML business reengineering, and quality initiatives.

The author, Clive Finkelstein and Peter Aiken,
October 1, 1999
Overview of the Book
When we wrote "Building Corporate Portals with XML", Peter Aiken and I were concerned that XML and Enterprise Portals (to use their alternative name) would be seen as yet another silver bullet. XML and its related technologies are exciting, and they certainly have great potential. But to achieve that potential requires effort. Our focus therefore was not to cover the technologies exhaustively (as they are still evolving) but instead to provide enterprise guidance for the Design, Development and Deployment of Enterprise Portals, using XML as one of several enabling technologies.

The industry is in the early stages of the application of XML to the development of Enterprise Portals. Some Enterprise Portals will evolve from Data Warehouses. Others will emerge from the integration of dissimilar systems using XML - helping to integrate structured data in relational databases and legacy systems with unstructured data in text documents, reports, email, graphics, images, audio and video resources. New business process opportunities and systems will emerge. Existing processes will be reengineered to take advantage of these new opportunities. We will all be surprised by what changes from the impossible (yesterday) to the possible, tomorrow.

XML and Enterprise Portals both depend on knowledge of the metadata - the jargon or terminology; the language - used within an enterprise. Like people who speak different languages, communication without a language dictionary is very difficult, if not impossible. Without enterprise metadata, any communication between dissimilar systems using XML is also very difficult, if not impossible.

We therefore structured the book not as a definitive text on the technologies, as they are rapidly evolving. Instead we focused on methods, well known and based on Information Engineering and Enterprise Engineering concepts, to set down the steps that enterprises can follow to gain advantage from the new opportunities that will emerge.

Part 1 (Enterprise Portal Design) presents strategic business planning and data modeling methods that are used with methods for strategic modeling and decision early warning. We show how these forward engineering methods are used to define the knowledge and metadata needed by new systems to realize the opportunities presented by Enterprise Portals and XML.

Part 2 (Enterprise Portal Development) recognizes that no enterprise operates in a vacuum; there are existing databases and systems that will need to be reverse engineered to enable the metadata from these resources to be utilized - so they can be integrated with new systems and databases defined in Part 1.

Using the enterprise metadata identified in Parts 1 and 2,
Part 3 (Enterprise Portal Deployment) introduces XML concepts. It then shows how XML is used as a technology for Business Reengineering and Systems Reengineering. It introduces a number of products to assist in the design, development and deployment of Enterprise Portals - including modeling tools to automatically generate XML metadata tags and definition files, XML database products, Enterprise Portals, text mining and information dissemination products.

"Corporate Portals unlock essential information from both structured data in relational databases and legacy systems and unstructured data in all documents and graphic files. Corporate Portals provide access to the cumulative knowledge resources of an organization through a single corporate gateway."--BOOK JACKET.

"Building Corporate Portals with XML provides a foundation to implement this revolutionary knowledge management technology. The book takes the reader from the planning stages to creating and implementing a Corporate Portal using the Extensible Markup Language (XML). The book also clearly explains how to convert data from a legacy system into a modern Corporate Portal."--BOOK JACKET.

Amazon.com
Getting a handle on an organization's related internal and external information is a daunting task. Building Corporate Portals with XML is a guide to moving to integrated Web portals to serve internal processes, external partners, and customers.

Heavily laden with theory, this title is best suited to system architects rather than developers under tight time constraints. Coauthor Clive Finkelstein is the creator of the Information Engineering methodology, which he uses to suggest approaches to moving legacy and relational data to portal access using XML as the information backbone. The discussions are thought-provoking and quite informative, but the acronym-heavy presentation is not for everyone.

After laying out the basic portal concepts, the authors move into the process of designing scalable information systems and modeling their data appropriately. The heart of the book focuses on enterprise metadata, how to define it, and how to implement it via XML. There are some concise examples of XML metadata implementation, but they are nestled within a rather complex discussion of the process of information analysis.

Although the focus of this title is Web portals, the majority of the book does not focus on Web site interfaces. Instead it probes deeper, offering a mile-high view of how to approach a wide-scale portal project. Don't look to this book for code snippets to implement on your Web site--instead, use it to develop a data-oriented mindset. --Stephen W. Plain

Book News, Inc.
The authors show management executives and technology professionals how to move data warehouses and data marts to the Internet, intranet, and extranet. They discuss planning issues, such as goal analysis, data modeling, identifying needs through surveys, and decision early warning principles; development issues such as system metadata types and engineering activities; and deployment issues such as XML as a business reengineering technology, typical XML applications, and organizational quality initiatives. -- Copyright © 1999 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR All rights reserved Book News, Inc.®, Portland, OR