There's been a lot of talk about Web 2.0 these days and that leaves a lot of people wondering what does this mean for my business?  Well, this demonstration of  QED wiki, a project developed by the IBM emerging Internet standards group, shows one example of how businesses can use emerging Web 2.0 technologies, principles, and practices to bring real business value to the enterprise.  

Now, the first thing I should mention is that QED wiki is wiki based meaning it can run in a simple web browser.  

For this demonstration I’m going to act as a claims processor for a large insurance company, building a mashup to help me become more efficient in my day-to-day work.  To get started, I'll create a wiki page by simply selecting Create a Page, give the page a name, in this case I'll use claims, and then I'll select a template I want to use.  

To start building my wiki page, I’ll click the assemble button QED wiki provides me with palette drawers full of different widgets that I can mash together to build a quick, situational application.  To lay out my page, I'll pull a widget from the content layout drawer and create a quick table.  And with the table on my page I'll just right click to add another column.

Now that I've got my page laid out, I'll need to add some content so I'll open the palette drawer that contains some widgets that specifically deal with insurance claims.  To get a list of the claims I need to process I'll drop the ACORD viewer on to the left column.  We use ACORD forms because they’re described in a standard format for sharing data across the insurance industry.  Next, I’ll need to get information on the policyholders for these claims and since my policyholder information comes from a different database, I'll use the content viewer widget to connect to the database and get information.  Now that I've got all that in place, I need to add one more thing to process the claims, I need to verify the address and the phone number of the people filing the claims.

For the customer address information, my company subscribes to a service from ESRI, a leader in global information systems.  To connect to the ESRI system, I'll drop this widget onto the bottom of my page and QED wiki uses micro formats to create a linkage between the widgets.  Well now that I'm done mashing up my content, I'll switch to view mode so I can see the results.  In the left pane, I can see the claims I need process and when I click on one of the claims, I get the claim holders information that was returned from the database.  When I want to validate this person's address, QED wiki pulls the address information from the client record and uses ESRI for both of the address verification and to show me the location information on a map.To validate the phone number, I can just click and see that, in this case, it's not a valid number.  

Now, this all seems like magic but what really happened behind the scenes?  Well, the claims form information was provided to me by an atom feed which came directly from IBM's DB2 version 9.1.  The policyholder information also came from DB2 where it was already stored as a native XML document using pure XML.  To validate the address, I contacted ESRI, which validates the address and sent me mapping information that appeared at the bottom of the screen.  And to validate the phone number, QED wiki connected with the Web service from StrikeIron hiring using Web service description language.

The key here is that I could mash up different services from different sources because they all use open Internet standards and since what I created is wiki based, I can simply click share and then send the page link to everyone in my department.  And when others in my department have great ideas, they can improve upon what I've done and then share it with the team, making us all more productive.  By sharing productivity tools and allowing others to improve upon them, we are fulfilling one of the principles of Web 2.0: applications get better the more people use them.  Users add value. 

Well, this is only one example of how IBM is exploring the use of Web 2.0 to bring real business value to the enterprise and we’re discovering more every day.  To learn more and to get started using Web 2.0 technology and practices in your company, please visit us at www.IBM.com/developerworks.