Development Life Cycle for Semantically Coherent Data Exchange Specification

In enterprise integration, a data-exchange specification is an architectural artifact that evolves along with the business. Maintaining a coherent, data-exchange, semantic model is an important, yet nontrivial task. A coherent, semantic model of data — exchange specifications supports reuse, promotes interoperability, and, consequently, reduces integration costs. Components of data-exchange specifications must be consistent and valid in terms of agreed upon standards and guidelines. In this article, we propose an activity model for the creation, test, and maintenance of a shared semantic model that is coherent and supports scalable standards-based enterprise integration. While it frames our research and the development of tools to support those activities for semantic models implemented using XML (Extensible Markup Language) Schema, the activity model presented in this article is independent of the data-exchange technology.