Virtual integration is a dream in the network economy
and holds an enormous potential for cost savings and productivity increases.
Today's vertically integrated companies are expected to be displaced by focused,
fast, flexible companies--virtually integrated. By concentrating on
best-in-class core capabilities and outsourcing slices of their activities that
others do better, companies will group and offer integrated services across the
web and disband the integration painlessly when the job is finished. Although
the web presents an ideal place that facilitates virtual integration through
universal connection, today's HTML-based web sites are isolated islands and
cannot communicate with each other on a user’s behalf in any reusable way.
Today integrating contents and services on the web requires the user to repeat a
very tedious process including saving bookmarks, repeated clicks, copy and paste
screen shots, downloading files, merging data on his PC, and so on. These
problems are multiplied if you use data and services from non-HTML sources, such
as legacy mainframe systems, PDF files, and ftp sites.
The
widely acclaimed XML standard is believed to able to address the problem of
integrating web-based content and services. XML
is a widely supported industry standard defined by the World Wide Web
Consortium, the same organization that created the standards for the Web
browser. XML
provides a means of separating actual data from the presentational view of that
data. It is a key to the Next Generation Internet, offering a way to unlock
information so that it can be organized, programmed and edited; a way to
distribute data in more useful ways to a variety of digital devices; and
allowing Web sites to collaborate and provide a constellation of Web Services
that will be able to interact with each another. However, with the current
technology, augmenting millions of exiting HTML web sites with XML requires the
work of millions of XML programmers, a highly impossible solution considering
the limited growth rate of programmer population compared to the exponential
growth of new web technologies.
HedgeWeb's goal is to provide the XML-based technology to
virtual integration of businesses on the web a reality by reusing the web
instead of rewriting it, following the philosophy of “write once and reuse
many”.