The Misguided Silver Bullet: What Xml Will and Will Not Do to Help Information Integration
11 Pages Posted: 14 Nov 2001
Date Written: October 2001
Abstract
The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) offers many important benefits and improvements over its predecessor, HTML. But, articles have appeared about XML with exaggerated claims of it being a "Rosetta Stone" with "miraculuous ways" to almost automatically provide information integration. These claims are actually being believed by some executives. It is almost surprising that no one has claimed that XML can cure cancer and provide world peace! In reality, XML must face many of the same challenges that plagued Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and database integration efforts of the past. To a large extent, there are both managerial and technical challenges - much related to the difficulties of attaining universally accepted semantically-rich standards. In this paper, these challenges will be discussed with specific emphasis on the issue of dealing with a real-world with multiple "contexts." Some promising research directions, some overlapping with the "semantic web" effort, will be presented.
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
Financial Information Integration in the Presence of Equational Ontological Conflicts
By Aykut Firat, Stuart Madnick, ...
-
By Aykut Firat, Stuart Madnick, ...
-
Improving Uccnet-Compliant B2b Supply-Chain Applications Using a Context Interchange Framework
By Steven Y. Tu, Stuart Madnick, ...