Vision Statement

The Vision-and-Scope workshop and interviews conducted in the third quarter of 2007 produced the following vision statement:

The purpose of the RCS is to provide a clearinghouse of information about components, services, technologies, and solutions in a collaborative workspace so that application and database development, and architecture are performed in an effective and efficient manner, capitalizing on lessons learned from others and promoting re-use of previous work.

The implementation of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) at EPA requires a vehicle of outreach and discovery for a multitude of reusable system components. EPA and the Exchange Network (EN) have a vision of a master catalog, or super-registry, that would provide a one-stop place to discover components of many different types, hosted and/or managed by many different organizations.

In addition, the Data Standards Branch (DSB) within EPA’s Office of Environmental Information (OEI) has been involved in the setup and maintenance of registries and in the support of enterprise architecture, terminology services, and substance services such as the XML Registry used by the EN. The RCS is the direct result of developers and users, both from program offices and the EN, approaching DSB with inquiries and requests for the location of registries for many types of objects, services, and components, such as data models, code sets, web services, and pieces of code.

The Agency-wide interest raised by the RCS and the planned alignment with the Agency’s Enterprise Architecture has positioned the RCS to become the Service Catalog for the Agency’s SOA Initiative being developed by the Information Exchange and Services Division.

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