Enterprise Integration Patterns
Ok I am finally getting around to reading Enterprise Integration Patterns (I bought it back in May at Tech Ed San Diego and it has sat on a shelf until 2 weeks ago (Ugh)). Well I am looking at the Messaging patterns and I have come to the amazing conclusion that a lot of the problems which the “semantic web” people have been trying to solve have already been mostly solved back in the old days of MOM. 75% of the problem is how do you deal with data (i.e. Messages) that arrive in multiple different formats, and then use that data in such a way as to allow your application to not become a maintenance nightmare.
So now that I know how to deal with my basic problem the issue of what common data format am I going to convert to. So far I am thinking that instead of converting to one Meta-Format (probably an impossible thing to do anyway; no format can deal with every different kind of data in the multiple different scientific arenas(my specific domain)). I think instead I will pick out a set of already defined XML standards and just convert semantically equivalent data formats to the equivalent well defined standard; while this will not eliminate the fact that I will have multiple different data representations in my application, it will minimize the number of different formats in the system.
Well hopefully this will actually work (thank goodness this is a research project and not a production app:); if it does then I will write a full article on this subject.