LIXItech

This may have slipped under your radar

LIXI Products 1.3* has finally been released. After close to three years work, re-work, and re-work of the re-work followed by starting over and doing it all again. Sigh. But that's all in the past now! The main thing is that it's done and ready for use. If you can't think how to deploy it I suggest you take a close look at the Visible Loans project for inspiration.

The new schema is available for download by LIXI members here, and a User Guide can be found here.

* Observant LIXIphiles may be wondering why a new standard has the designation "1.3". This is because LIXI CAL up to CAL 1.2 included a DTD specifically for product information. It was an odd place to put it, and to the best of my knowledge no-one actually used it, but it was there.

Visible Loans

The LIXI Visible Loans Project is a joint venture with NICTA that is looking at the potential for distributing lending information like a news feed - i.e. publishing information that other parties can subscribe to. This approach doesn't make sense for point-to-point links (e.g. brokers submitting loan applications to lenders) but it makes plenty of sense for anything that is broadcast, such as product information. Instead of every lender having to establish a product update connection to all of their brokers, they could just add the product news feed to their existing broker websites and the brokers could simply subscribe to whichever lender news feeds they're interested in. Way simpler, cheaper and faster. And potentially applicable to other lending processes as well - even backchannel and commissions data could potentially be distributed via news feeds generated dynamically in response to queries from securely identified brokers. The key point is that anything distributed as a news feed doesn't need hand-crafted web service connections.

Because working examples make even great ideas easier to understand the Visible Loans Project is creating a reference implementation in much the same way that we created a reference implementation of the Valuations standard. This will again be freely available to all LIXI members and is due for completion by the end of 2007. In the meantime a white paper is under development to describe the what, why and how of the project. An early draft can be downloaded here if you are curious - Download LIXIPubSub_v0.7.pdf.

But the best way to get a good look at Visible Loans will be to attend the presentation at the LIXI Industry Forum next week (3:50pm in the technical stream).

Progress (yes I said progress) on Products

The Products Working Group met again today to go through the draft Products schema put forward by Erik Fenna. A number of changes resulted but overall I think the feeling was that we had a workable solution. We'll be meeting again next week to try to push this long, long running saga to a close.

On a less positive note, the Products marathon appears to have burnt off most of the working group participants. There are only a handful of members still actively involved and this is a problem because the majority of LIXI members will have their first exposure to the new standard once it's released and they're trying to implement. Experience shows that at this point many will suddenly realise that in fact they do have specific and essential requirements that they want included in the standard - and as a result we will end up having to do Products 1.1 much sooner than I'd like. A very wasteful outcome.

Please, if you think that automated, standardised updating of product data to brokers is something you could be interested in you owe it to yourself to get involved now and review the draft before it's too late.