Using XML to facilitate management across multiple local government agencies

The main barriers to the level of electronic data interchange required to seamlessly integrate services offered by legacy systems in an Internet environment are the need for applications to share a common data definition and the non-heterogeneity in database platforms. It is true that current web based services can prove effective as the foundation for small groups of collaborating organisations with an agreed standard ontology to conduct transactions over the Internet. This has been demonstrated by the retailing industry’s Collaborative Planning Forecasting and Replenishment initiative, and the PC manufacturing industry’s RosettaNet. However, some doubts remain as to whether these representations will scale to support automated commerce between large, loosely coupled groups wanting to access services and share data. These doubts are due to the wide variety of database systems in use and the way these systems are implemented and used. This paper details a collaborative research initiative between the Penrith City Council, Penrith Australia and the Centre for Advanced Systems Engineering (CASE) at the University of Western Sydney. It details the development of a fully functioning XML-based prototype system that provides effective integration of services offered by a collaborating group of legacy systems. The key contribution of this work is to provide an open systems based infrastructure that allows collaborating legacy systems, based on heterogeneous database and server platforms, to offer an integrated query service over the Internet