Web Services. It's the semantics stupid. Unfortunately XML etc. doesn't address the most difficult part of web services, what does the data mean. The actual technical problems are not too hard, thought XML does at least remove the problem of writing yet another parser for a data representation system, and XSLT is good for transforming from one representation to another. The difficult thing is to decide on what all the identifiers mean and then to communicate that understanding between systems. How do two or more parties agree on a common vocabulary for exchanging information? This either requires they use an existing format/vocabulary, in which they both have to understand it, and make sure their understanding is the same, or they have to work out a common format/vocabulary themselves. How can some of this be automated? The writing of the actual mapping code from the common format to my internal format is tedious but easily automated. The much more difficult problem is to decide which internal field or column etc. should be used for holding, for example, the "cost" value that the common format provides. Posted by Alex at December 12, 2001 09:29 AM