1.3 Overview

Enterprises have a variety of data stored in various line-of-business (LOB) systems. Typically, this data is accessible only through the proprietary programming interface of these software systems. It is desirable to be able to provide access to such data via a set of normalized interfaces so that users do not have to learn system-specific or adapter-specific programming patterns for each software system. To provide such access to data, it is useful to describe or model the LOB systems using a set of MetadataObjects and store the resulting metadata models in a metadata store.

Once a metadata store of metadata models is established, there are many scenarios that require access to metadata models on computers that are not servers. For example, a user may want to browse the catalog of LobSystems and the Entities in each LobSystem available on a front-end Web server, but from inside a custom application that is written for a client computer in an enterprise. For this purpose, this protocol provides remote access to a subset of the MetadataObjects over a Web service-based protocol.