One of the major challenges facing an application developer when confronted with the requirement to integrate two or more information systems is the diversity of means of representing meta data that different systems use. Even though two systems may refer to the same entity - they may each provide different meta data about that entity in different forms, possibly with some overlaps and possibly not. With just two systems to integrate, this can be a hard problem. With three, four or more systems, it rapidly becomes infeasible unless the meta data is first mapped into some common meta data set. Topic maps provide just the kind of flexible data structure that is required for representing this meta data and can supplement the meta data with links back into the data sources themselves.
When applying topic maps to this particular problem, an effective design pattern is to create a common meta data definition as a topic map schema and then write one 'connector' application for each information system. The connector application simply maps the meta data from the information system into the appropriate topic map constructs. The integrator can now treat each information system as a provider of topic map data using a well-known topic map schema and can develop applications against a single API which accesses this topic-mapped information.
Starbase Corporation is a leading provider of collaboration solutions for business application management. Starbase offers a family of user-friendly software products that enable teams of people to collaborate in the development and management of Web sites, e-commerce and business critical applications. The flagship product of Starbase, is the StarTeam repository which provides source code control, defect tracking, change management and task management and workflow functionality. Starbase is using topic map technology as a central element in a new product architecture which focuses on extracting value from information. As a repository, Starbase's software can hold a huge amount of information - some customers have StarTeam repositories in excess of 30GB for a single server. Exponential growth in hardware capabilities, such as processing power, storage capacity, and network connectivity, will offer still greater capacity to create information. All of this available information is described by Starbase as an "Information Tsunami".
Starbase's new information architecture creates a unified view into a "technical collaboration space", providing access to all information resources, regardless of the product and project repository where they physically reside, be it a StarTeam repository, CaliberRM (a web-based system for managing project requirement information), Microsoft Exchange, custom information systems, and so on. The technical implementation is based upon topic map technology delivered by Ontopia. Within the system architecture, topic map technology is used as a core infrastructure technology to enable collaboration between diverse information systems. The use of topic maps enables Starbase to develop functionality such as:
finding information based on semantic queries
guiding traditional text search engines
providing intuitive navigation of information spaces
providing a framework for "knowledge events"
For Starbase, the choice to use topic map technology was made after careful evaluation of many different technologies and standards. Their decision was influenced by a number of factors. Most importantly, topic maps are a standards-based technology making use of XML, this providing advantages in interoperability and the ability to leverage existing implementations. In addition, Starbase believes that the flexibility and simplicity of the topic map architecture permits applicability of this technology far beyond its original design objectives - thus ensuring its status as a long-lived technology.
Of course, being on the "bleeding edge" created challenges getting corporate buy-in - especially as topic maps, being a new technology, has yet to provide many demonstrable cases of significant business value being derived from its application. The team responsible for developing the new system architecture worked hard to produce a proof-of-concept system in order to demonstrate value to their management.
Being a supplier of mission-critical software development support systems, the primary aim of Starbase is to deliver benefits to their customers in the form of more efficient knowledge-working. The new, topic map based, information architecture should provide their customers with a return on investment right away, as users benefit from being able to find existing information with much less effort than is required today. The topic map system also provides a framework for supporting "knowledge event" detection, which allows relevant information to be delivered to users without requiring an explicit search. Future developments will further integrate other development tools, allowing these tools to make better use of the domain knowledge held in the system. Although the primary objective of this approach is to increase the personal and team efficiency for software development processes, the number of dependencies between those individuals and teams and the rest of the organization means that the benefits will spill over into many parts of the enterprise.
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