A New Specification for Managing Metadata

Hello

I found this article very interesting.

John

A New Specification for Managing Metadata
Chuck Mosher, Java Developers

Today's Internet-driven economy has accelerated users' expectations
for unfettered access to information resources and transparent data
exchange among applications. This exchange requires a deep knowledge
of how each application, tool, or service structures and interprets
the information it uses. The term metadata is used to describe both
how this information is structured (its syntax) and what it means
(its semantics). Unfortunately, most applications define metadata
differently. Each uses slightly different programming structures,
syntax, and semantics to model their metadata. These
incompatibilities make it challenging for one application to discover
and interact with the data maintained by another application. To
overcome this hurdle, companies typically spend lots of developer
time and money building hard-wired interfaces between applications so
they can share data in sophisticated ways. This costly and ongoing
effort is the result of a lack of common metadata -- or more
specifically, a common model for creating metadata (a metamodel).
This stifles the development of robust solutions to common business
problems that require combining or using data from multiple,
heterogeneous applications.

http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2EE/JMI/

Received on Friday, 12 April 2002 15:06:23 UTC