Extensio
Information Services: The Building Blocks for Information Delivery
To power ubiquitous information delivery, enterprises need information delivery technology, such as Extensio Symphony, that provides real-time information services from enterprise and web data stores directly on business user's tools, but without exposing the meta data, the data or its origin, to the business users.
The Extensio Information Delivery technology is based on
the notion of Information Services. Information Services,
broadly speaking, can be defined as a logically grouped set
of information elements, extracted from data source(s) about
an information entity. Information services are analogous
to Web services, but are distinct from web services based
on their intended usage. Web Services are designed and meant
to provide data and information from one application to another,
creating a business process interface. Information Services, on the
other hand, are designed to deliver information as a service,
and meant to the consumed by human beings.
For example, a Customer Information Service may take a Customer
ID and return the customer name, address, phone number, and
credit rating. End users view and consume this service without
knowing that the customer name, address and phone numbers
has come from their back-end CRM application, while the credit
rating has its data sourced from a web application.
An Extensio information service may have information elements
combined from multiple data source, or could be the result
of a mash-up or transform operation on the original data elements.
Information services are typically hosted on a server within
the data-center.
Benefits of Information Service based Approach
There are two major benefits of using Information Services
as building blocks for information delivery:
- Ease of User for End-Users:
By moving to a information service-based approach, users
simply specify the information they want (e.g. customer
rating service), and then get the related data from the
service directly into their information interface, without
having to know the where, the how, and the when of the data.
It is the service now that knows the details of getting
the data and not the user. Contrast this with manual extraction
and assembly of data, where the user logs in to different
application, extracts the data needed, combines it with
other relevant information from other sources, and then
views it within the required interface.
Build-Once-Deploy-Many: Once
an information service has been built, it can be re-used for
multiple user channels, by simply adding the presentation
rules for the channel. Data extraction and assembly for information
elements is done once, and then deployed to other channels
with zero intergration work. This radically improves re-use
and reduces development and deployment time. interface.
Extensio Information Service: A Brief Description
An Extensio Information Service can be fully
described by the following:
- The Service Schema: Consists
of service inputs and outputs, including their name and
description.
- The Service Execution Rules:
The execution rules for the service, also called as Service
rules, that specify how the data constituents of the information
service are extracted, assembled and then delivered as
an information service.
Service rules are specified by a Service Developer using
Extensio Studio, the service development environment provided
with Extensio Symphony. The service rules built using
Extensio Studio are saved as a XML file within the Extensio
repository. The XML based service rule is executed by
the Extensio Information Delivery server at run time.
The Information Service Schema
The service schema consists of:
Input information entity:
Also called as the "key" for the information service. The
information entity is named based on its popular usage,
understood by the human beings who use the entity in their
work. Some services may not have an information key, or
have an implicit key.
Example:
- Input/Information Service Key: Customer
- Information Service Key Name: "Customer" is the key
name given to "Customer_Code", the name given in the CRM
application
- Information Service without a key: A Customer List information
can be implicitly defined as the current list of customers.
Output information elements:
Output information elements of the information service: Consists
of the information elements that define the information service.
A service may have Information elements from multiple sources.
The information elements are named based on their popular
usage, understood by the human beings who understand them.
Example:
- Information Output Elements: Name, Address, Phone No.,
credit rating
- Information Service Output Element: Name
- Information Service Output Name: "Name" information
element comes from a database table in a CRM database,
called as "Customer_Identifier_Name" within its original
context of the CRM application. The contentsof the Customer
Identifier Name table, are renamed as "Name"
by the service developer, within the context of the information
service.
The Information Service Rules
The information
service rules defines the data extraction assembly and delivery
rules for the information elements that constibute the information
service.
Data Extraction Rules: Data extraction
rules essentially specifies the data source, the extraction
code for the required data element, and user-authentication
mode required for the data extraction.
Data Assembly Rules: Once the information
elements and their data extraction rules are specifiec,
data assembly rules specify how the various information
elements are to be grouped together to create a single
cohesive information service. Information elements may
need to be transformed across multiple applications to
enable a single unique information entity code. Information
elements may be piped from one data source to another
to gather relevant and contextual data. The information
elements may even be subjected to complex sorting and
aggregation algorhythms, using the custom code in Java
or Javascript tools provided by Extensio Studio.
Information Delivery Rules for Multiple User Channels: Once the
service extraction and assembly rules are defined, rules for
delivering the services on the required user channels need
to be specified. These service delivery rules are essentially
a set of rules that define the presentation for the service,
which is defined appropriate to the desired delivery channel.
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