AIA & Canonicals, Just Good Friends?

Last time I talked about the Canonical Data Model (CDM) pattern. What I haven't discussed yet, is how this pattern is implemented in the Oracle SOA Suite.

Actually the SOA Suite itself does not explicitly support this pattern, simply because enforcing any specific data model should not be seen as the task of any infrastructure tooling, including the SOA Suite. Nevertheless, the concept of a common data model can very well be implemented for specific industries. The goal being that parties in that industry can communicate more easily because by using a CDM they actually talk a common language, at least to some extend.

This concept already is being used in various "industries". Examples are CDM's for governments allowing central and local governments to exchange information with each other about their citizens. CDM's in the health care industry allow doctors, insurance companies and other stakeholders to exchange information about patients.

More recently, Oracle introduced the Application Implementation Architecture or AIA for short. As in the communication about it the focus seems to be on the common process aspect perhaps a little bit of a hidden feature of AIA, but the industry foundation packs of AIA could not exist without the CMD's they are based upon. Perhaps the common data model is of even greater value than the common process.

Once defined a CDM should be accessible by every process that is making use of it, preferably by means of XML schemas. In case of the SOA Suite, rather than importing (and with that copying) the schemas in each and every BPEL project, a way to do this is by including all coherent XML schemas of a CDM in one single, dummy BPEL process, as explained by Marc Kelderman.