The applications making a difference today are using the Web to enable communication and cooperation between businesses. This new focus forces Information Technology (IT) to go well beyond traditional department or company boundaries. Developing these new applications can be extremely slow and difficult. Data definitions taken from off-the-shelf applications can be cryptic and arcane. Custom application development and integration projects too often use definitions decipherable only to a company’s IT “insiders”. An effective platform for application interoperability is a goal rarely achieved.
Sometimes useful abstractions can be layered on top of a legacy application. But these abstractions are difficult to design and hard to keep up to date when support for new documents and messages needs to be added every day to a company’s application portfolio.
