Why Don't We Do It in the Road Ahead?
—Part 1, Infrastructure Realignment
> Web services
Jerry Laiserin

Third principle of infrastructure realignment: everything that's online will become actively connected, machine2machine, via the "semantic web."
Although the moniker is painfully vague, "web services" comprise the foundation of the next-generation internet and are maturing at a rapid pace. The internet boom of the nineties offered the prospect of building elaborate "e-business" structures, but failed to deliver any glue to hold those structures together. In the aughties, web services will provide that glue.

Hypertext markup language (HTML) provides human-readable formats for displaying content on the web. However, HTML offers no way to determine whether a displayed number, for example, is a date, a unit of measure, an amount of currency or a catalog identifier. Without such semantic distinctions, or meaning, computers can't "read" and act on information contained in each others' web pages. The eXtensible markup language (XML) and related technologies provide the semantic context for web content by creating a relatively simple declarative framework for naming and defining things (tags) and their properties (attributes). Thus, a "project" has a "start," an "end" and a "duration"—with start and end being in date format, and duration counted in days from start to end.

Discipline- or domain-specific XML "dialects" (schemas) handle issues such as reconciling projects that "start" and "end" with those that "initiate" and "terminate" [which was the goal of the aecXML project that I helped launch in 1999—now a part of the < IAI>—JL]. On this foundation of mutual machine2machine understanding, users can build web services that link multiple projects and sub-projects across multiple enterprises, with all project data automatically updated and synchronized on all processing and display devices of all project participants. More than just projects, everything from code requirements and site constraints to product selection and quantity takeoffs can be enhanced and accelerated via web services. Brands to watch are Microsoft's .NET and IBM Lotus/WebSphere, which will be used in industry-wide, inter-enterprise web services, and deployed by technologically aggressive AEC firms to support internal information integration/coordination efforts.
JL



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