TABLE OF CONTENTS Reuse is one of the most misunderstood concepts in information technology. Many technology executives assume that anything in their inventory (e.g., models, designs, application programs, databases, interfaces, and transactions) can be reused to advantage. They desire the economic benefits intuitive to the concept of reuse but may be unaware of the tactical costs required to achieve these benefits. Technology managers are challenged with aggressive deadlines and limited budgets and often avoid the modifications to their development methodology that are required to achieve effective reuse. Technology practitioners are rewarded for rapid delivery and the number of tested lines of code they develop. In other words, the goals that drive development of new applications are different from those that support reuse. However, all is not lost. The syntactical and functional capabilities afforded by W3C XML Schemas provide tremendous support and opportunities for metadata reuse. The first challenge is to develop a fundamental understanding of what reuse is all about.
From the perspective of information technology, reuse is a two-part process that first targets the engineering of information assets with the intent of being able to use these assets more than once and then harvesting these reusable technology assets:
Reuse engineering
Reuse harvesting
| Fact: | XML schema reuse engineering is the set of practices, techniques, and activities required to engineer a W3C XML Schema or schema component with the specific intent of reuse. |
Reuse engineering is the set of practices and techniques required to construct, engineer, and describe a technology asset...
