Before the existence of acs-reference, the ACS required that you preload some tables in a script to get some basic reference functionality. There were many problems with this:
<h3>II. Introduction</h3>
</p>
Reference data is often overlooked in the rush to get coding. In reality, much of ....
<ul>
<h3>III. Historical Considerations</h3>
<li>No easy way to find out what reference data even existed.</li>
Before the existence of acs-reference, the ACS required that you preload some tables in a script to get some basic reference functionality. There were many problems with this:
<li>No way to find out how old the data was.</li>
<ul>
<li>No way to find out where that data came from.</li>
<li>No easy way to find out what reference data even existed.</li>
<li>Very US/English slant on the data.</li>
<li>No way to find out how old the data was.</li>
</ul>
<li>No way to find out where that data came from.</li>
<h3>III. Design Tradeoffs</h3>
<li>Very US/English slant on the data.</li>
<h4>Primary Goals</h4>
</ul>
<ul>
<h3> IV. Competitive Analysis</h3>
<li>This system was designed with maintainability and reusability as its primary goals. By wrapping a layer around all of the reference tables we have increased the maintainability immensely.</li>
The only real competition is internally developed solutions.
<li>Another goal was to bring together many different types of data and present them in a logical fashion. It was amazing how little of this data is available on the internet in a database friendly form.</li>
<h3> V. Design Tradeoffs</h3>
</ul>
<h4>Primary Goals</h4>
<h4>Performance</h4>
<ul>
When updating the reference tables their is overhead due to the fact that the table is registered with the repository. This should rarely occur anyway as the tables are only added once.
<li>This system was designed with maintainability and reusability as its primary goals. By wrapping a layer around all of the reference tables we have increased the maintainability immensely.</li>
By not having the actual data itself in the acs-object system, subsequent additions and deletions to the reference tables themselves are unaffected by this overhead.
<li>Another goal was to bring together many different types of data and present them in a logical fashion. It was amazing how little of this data is available on the internet in a database friendly form.</li>
When updating the reference tables their is overhead due to the fact that the table is registered with the repository. This should rarely occur anyway as the tables are only added once.
<p>The UNSPSC reference data has a data model for handling data
By not having the actual data itself in the acs-object system, subsequent additions and deletions to the reference tables themselves are unaffected by this overhead.
revisions. An application can determine any new/revised category based
<h3> VI. API</h3>
on existing, obsolete data.</p>
<h3> VII. Data Model Discussion</h3>
<h3>VI. User Interface</h3>
<h3> VIII. User Interface</h3>
<p>Their is no end user interface.
Their is no end user interface.
There needs to be some kind of admin UI to report status and possibly
There will
manage updates per requirements.
<h3> IX. Configuration/Parameters</h3>
</p>
None
<h3>VII. Configuration/Parameters</h3>
<h3> X. Future Improvements/Areas of Likely Change</h3>
<p>None</p>
A server based update mechanism will be supported. This will allow for tables to be updated (and preferably diffed) instead of being reloaded with a package upgrade.
<h3>VIII. Future Improvements/Areas of Likely Change</h3>
An interface to produce xml/csv from the reference data would be a nice service to the community (allowing legacy applications a way to import this data).
<p>A server based update mechanism will be supported. This will allow for tables to be updated (and preferably diffed) instead of being reloaded with a package upgrade.
<h3> XI. Authors</h3>
An interface to produce xml/csv from the reference data would be a nice service to the community (allowing legacy applications a way to import this data).
<h3> XII. Revision History</h3>
</p>
<pre>
<h3>IX. Authors</h3>
<p>
Jon Griffin
</p>
<h3>X. Pre-CVS Revision History</h3>
<pre>
$Log$
$Log$
Revision 1.4 2006/08/06 20:40:20 torbenb
upgrading html, closing li p tags, adding quotes to tag attributes