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Metadata Watch Report #1

[ contents | section 1 | section 2 ]

Section 3 - Domain reports

3.1 Industrial sector
3.2 Publishing sector
3.3 Audio-visual sector
3.4 Educational sector
3.5 Academic sector
3.6 Research sector
3.7 Geographical information sector

3.1 Industrial sector

Current state of domain, main issues, trends, and overlaps and gaps

Activities are generally carried out by:

  1. Not-for-profit consortia, mostly comprised of for-profit companies
  2. Individual for-profit companies

Outputs generally fall into the following categories:

  1. Applications of XML
  2. Tools
  3. Frameworks, schemas, rules and metadata sets
  4. Registries

The subcategories in the industry domain are shown below. An asterisk indicates that a number of bona fide SCHEMAS-worthy activities were found in each respective subcategory:

  • General*
  • Advertising*
  • Automotive*
  • Banking, finance and insurance, a.k.a. financial services
  • Computer hardware manufacturers*
  • Computer software manufacturers
  • Computer software integration and services
  • Electric power distribution
  • Manufacturing
  • Retail and B-to-B commerce and communications*
  • Search engines
  • Telecoms
  • Transportation and logistics

The majority of the work in the Industry domain is targeted to b-to-b Web commerce and in the creation and management of internal business information systems.

Applications of XML are fairly numerous and include such things as FinXML, FpML, FIXML, adXML, and Acord XML and are nearly always defined by consortia.

Applications of XML are generally targeted at a particular industry or industry subsector, such automotive, advertising, or financial services. One would think that these applications might have something in common and could therefore develop a core application from which industry-specific applications could be more easily developed, but this does not seem to be happening.

XML has been a real boon and is leveraged by a wide variety of initiatives.

The idea here seems to be to get a large enough group of important enough players to lend momentum to any particular XML application, especially in industries such as financial services where there are competing applications (an example of an overlap).

The main gap here is that most industries simply don't have standard applications of XML they can call their own.

Tools are generally created by individual for-profit companies and fall into two classes: "old school", or pre-Web, and Web-oriented. The vast majority of the working, tested and viable tools fall into the former category. There, the terms metadata and schema are generally applied to SQL databases, especially groups of SQL databases which conform to different schemas and which use different metadata sets to describe themselves.

What is needed here are tools that combine the quality of the old school with the Web-awareness of the new school into products that can work with content in relational databases and Web content at the same time with ease.

Frameworks don't have much of a place in this domain, i.e. industry, although there is the BizTalk framework, which, in principle, covers every industry. The BizTalk Registry of schemas is notable in part because of its size - 86 organisations have submitted a total of 401 schemas which are used by 652 parties.

Web-oriented tools are much more rare, and some of those that exist do so only in the form of vaporware or low-quality (poorly tested, feature-poor) packages.

Frameworks, schemas, rules and metadata sets are less advanced than in the other Schemas domains (publishing, broadcasting, etc.). I would expect to see frameworks, schemas, rules and metadata sets in the industry domain to leverage those created in other domains, ones that are farther ahead in the process.

The only working registry found so far is the BizTalk Registry of schemas. Unfortunately, it is not designed to be machine-readable, although a clever programmer probably could create a machine to read it, and is more difficult than necessary for humans to read.

Research into the subcategories of (a) transportation and logistics and (b) electrical power distribution revealed little or no activity. The automotive industry, well known for being one of the early pioneers of b-to-b communications and commerce (as well as b-to-c) showed much less activity than expected.

>>Section 3.2 Publishing sector

[ contents | section 1 | section 2 ]

Maintained by: UK Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN)
Last updated: 07 August 2001