Federated query, Xquery, XML rules and content analysis, are just some of the emerging key ingredients for business research integration, newsmastering and similar new activities entering the coming new fields, inside and outside the enterprise dedicated to the gathering, filtering and intelligent aggregation of specialized information.

The so-called newsmaster cadre of new professionals.

Some interesting data and lots of valuabe "technical" information about what newsmastering is all about can be found in this article by Tim Matthews, who elegantly explains the emergence of on-demand intelligence research technologies inside the enterprise, where the uses and applications extend to many possible domains.

"Enterprise Information Integration (EII) has steadily gained momentum as a must-have tool in the arsenal of data architects.

Collecting information from an array of disparate sources and fusing it together in a unified view is just the ticket for a range of applications, including operational dashboards, risk management systems, compliance applications and more."

EII uses a distributed query approach to collect and integrate information from multiple sources. This is commonly referred to as federated query. With EII, queries are distributed to data sources and then the results are joined, or federated. This is quite different from other integration technologies.

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XML is the perfect 'information architecture' for on-demand intelligence because it spans disparate data sources. Everything from Web content to documents, to messages and structured data can be represented in XML.

It is also a tagged language: the information elements are surrounded by tags that explain their meaning. Tags specified in XML schema help define specific instances of XML data and give the tags specific meaning for an application, or even for an industry. These tags ease many issues around data meaning and common naming conventions that have plagued data architects for years.

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A key component of the architecture is a query language designed for XML. Called XQuery, it is something of a hybrid — a powerful language with grammar similar to SQL, but more widely applicable. It can be used to query any data source that can be represented in an XML model, which includes relational databases, XML document collections, Web Services and a variety of document formats which can have XML equivalents, such as Microsoft Word and Excel. This provides a unified query language for accessing a variety of data sources.

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Rules checking via XML is a powerful way to make sure business information adheres to business practices. It checks combinations of XML tags to make sure that values make sense. Rules checking via XML is a semantic check that looks at the values of fields.

Performing these kinds of checks on messages coming in can be an immediate source of operational on-demand intelligence. Using XQuery, rather than hard coding in Java or C#, makes them easier to deploy and keep up to date. This is because XQuery is declarative in nature, where you state the result you want to achieve rather than coding how you would go about achieving it. This results in compact code that is easier to read and maintain. The concept can even be extended to pull in reference values from other data sources.

Performing data and content analysis across information sources is quite straightforward. XQuery is used to search across information sources and discover patterns or trends.

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The power of on-demand intelligence is the ability to fuse information from disparate systems together, and then provide some additional processing on top.

In this way users can get access to the information that they need, as well as the intelligence they need to give them an edge.

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Given the growth of XML and the advantages of EII, more companies will change their view of on-demand intelligence.

They won't just want it, they'll demand it."

Excerpted from:
"Use Enterprise Information Integration To Get Intelligence From Non-Traditional Sources" - by Tim Matthews - Enterpriseappsonline - Intelligence enterprise

Tim Matthews is Co-Founder at Ipedo Inc, a leading vendor of Enterprise Information Management software. He has written extensively on data management and integration in publications such as XML Journal, DevX, and Tech Target, and presented widely on EII.