The latest application integration issue I experienced deals with a heavily utilized client server billing application. Several thousand Customer Service Representatives utilize a VB 6.0 application with no integration means to the Knowledge Repositories.
The challenge is the need to present information in the billing system based upon the context of the users’ actions and customer data, without re-writing the billing system. One solution is to utilize the Resource Description Framework based upon data accessed and decision trees to populate data within a browser window. The browser window is a separate ASP.net application. Within the billing-applications business tier as data is requested and retrieved for the presentation layer, logic quickly, runs through a library of RDF based XML files. When data elements match the RDF “Subject” value, more logic processing allows the display of knowledge artifacts (best practices and processes) based upon the customer, the data accessed, and data values. RDF provides a quick option to extend and integrate proprietary and older enterprise applications with knowledge repositories. The main challenge is maintenance of the subject taxonomy to match the corporate taxonomy and objects within the knowledge repository.
What is RDR?
RDF is a W3C standard to process metadata on the web. RDF is a framework to create statements about resources and is based on the idea of identifying things and describing resources in terms of simple properties and property values (Raisinghani & Sahoo, 2004). RDF was designed around network retrievable resources for the Internet, but has extended to describe any resource within a domain structure. This enhances web based functionality through enabling more processable information for Internet-based applications and portals (Bray, 2001).
An RDF is a collection that represents statements about modeled properties of resources. It contains three distinct parts, the ‘subject’ signifies the resource described; the ‘predicate’ signifies a property of the subject; and the ‘object’ indicates a value of that property for the specified resource (Brickley, 2001). The structure allows objects to contain a describer, based on parameters, allowing pointers and relationships to other objects.
Bray, T. What is RDF?, 2001.
Brickley, D. RDF: Understanding the striped RDF/XML syntax, 2001.
Raisinghani, M.S. and Sahoo, T., The emergent semantic web: Managing data efficiently. in Tenth Americas Conference on Information Systems, (New York, NY, 2004), 14-19.
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