The link between SOA and content aggregation

Joshua Michele-Ross is doing a superb interview series at FAST Forward 09 with various movers and shakers in content management, social media and search. While watching a video interview with blogger, author and analyst Joe McKendrick, I was struck by one point on the link between content aggregation and service oriented architecture or SOA.

McKendrick explains that when SOA first developed it was enterprise focused, but with the advent of social media in the enterprise known as Enterprise 2.0, it now involves external as well as internal content. One area he discusses is search. "When we talk about search we are talking about accessing multiple sources of data," he says. "This can be packaged as services and presented as services and it doesn't matter whether the content is internal or external."

From a content management perspective, this is quite an exciting prospect because as Michele-Ross points out, it allows us to get at meaningful content and bring it together into a unified result or experience. McKendrick says the goal of SOA has always been to take disparate sources of data and bring them together where we can aggregate the data and make it available on demand.

As vendors expose more of their products as services, we should see more use cases concerning how enterprise users can take advantage of SOA to bring content together in different ways and make if more useful for end users.

For more information:
- see Michele-Ross's video interview with Joe McKendrick
- and ABC: An Introduction to Service Oriented Architecture on CIO.com

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