Bob Glushko, School of Information Management and Systems
The School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS) and the e-Berkeley Program have established the Center for Document Engineering (CDE). The CDE's mission is "to invent, evaluate, and promote model-driven technologies and methods" that allow business semantics to drive IT systems.
Treating business relationships between organizations or companies as exchanges of digital documents is one of the "big new ideas" of the Internet revolution. But HTML creates a "web for eyes" that doesn't encode information in ways that can be processed by computers. XML, with its ability to define formal structural and semantic definitions for electronic documents, has rapidly emerged as a key enabling technology. Using XML to encode models of business processes and their associated documents overcomes the limits of HTML and creates an automatable, standards-based foundation for real-world business computing on the Internet. This model-driven, loosely coupled approach bridges the traditional chasms between design, implementation, and evolution.
Beginning in spring 2002, SIMS became the first academic institution in the world to teach courses on Document Engineering, emphasizing analysis and design methods that yield XML-encodable models of business processes and business documents. A collaboration with the e-Berkeley Program began soon afterwards because of the natural fit with e-Berkeley's goals of:
Creating the CDE in May 2003 was a logical next step to extend the vision of Document Engineering as a discipline. The CDE will serve as a focal point for research, development, and educational activities that span the academic and operational sides of the University. Collaboration with industry and campus computing units will ensure bidirectional technology transfer and relevance in research and graduate training. An advisory board whose members come from academic units, campus computing organizations, and industry will help set priorities and define project goals.
The CDE will create, collect, and disseminate XML schemas, software, best practices, and other content for building web services and applications that allow business semantics to drive IT systems and automate business processes.
The first initiative of the CDE is the Berkeley Academic Business Language (BABL), an evolving set of models and associated XML schemas for the domain of University education and operations. Work on BABL began in fall 2002 with models of "course" and "role" as they are used across numerous applications and contexts. For example, "course" is used in the Course Approval System, the Course Catalog, the Schedule of Classes, Transcripts, and so on.
Work is currently underway to develop models for "events" and "calendars", with the potential goal of developing a campuswide repository for events to enable their automated reuse and syndication. The project team members currently come from SIMS, IST–WSS, and Lawrence Hall of Science, exemplifying the cross-campus efforts in developing enterprise data models being sponsored and supported by the CDE.
A second major CDE initiative is an XML application platform that uses models like those in BABL to implement enterprise-class applications whose core data-models are encoded in XML. The platform has been optimized for a class of applications characterizable as "form data moving within and between organizations" — exactly the applications you encounter every day when submitting a project proposal, seeking reimbursement for expenses, registering for classes, and so on. This platform allows developers to represent data models, business rules, workflow specifications, and user interfaces as externalized XML documents, rather than mixing and scattering them throughout application code. This will make it easier for nonprogrammers to design, develop, and maintain forms and workflow-based Internet applications.
A third effort underway at the CDE, and the platform for its own website at http://cde.berkeley.edu/, is the "Center in a Box". The Center in a Box is a lightweight, XML-based content management system designed to allow small organizations to quickly deploy rich content to a variety of media, including the Web.
Based on the Apache Foundation's open-source Cocoon project, Center in a Box is a flexible framework that enables small organizations, such as the many "centers" on the Berkeley campus, to publish content in the form of web pages and Portable Document Format (PDF). At its core, Center in a Box defines schemas for the core components of most organizations, such as "person", "event", and "initiative". These schemas are designed in such a way as to be reusable and extensible to meet the specific needs of organizations deploying a Center in a Box solution.
Built-in stylesheets are included to transform this content into standard XHTML, automatically generating links and indexes. The XHTML is structurally sound and devoid of presentational elements such as the deprecated font tag. This allows page designers to build complex layouts and professional quality graphical presentations. This also means that the underlying XHTML is accessible and degrades appropriately to older browsers, screen readers, and search engine robots.
The CDE is hosting a monthly lecture series beginning at 4 p.m. on September 15, 2003, with a talk by Eve Maler of Sun Microsystems titled "Delivering on the Promise of XML".
A two-day workshop on BABL and the XML application platform will be held on November 20 and 21, 2003.
See the CDE website (http://cde.berkeley.edu/) for details on both events.
Organizations or individuals interested in becoming sponsors or research affiliates of the CDE are invited to contact SIMS Adjunct Professor Dr. Robert Glushko, or e-Berkeley Director Jon Conhaim,
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