I3 / ISS History
I I I I
1993 1995 1998 2000
Development Real Estate Emergence Implementation
of Real Estate Master Data of XML and of ISS at the
MLS desktop Dictionary conversion Office for the
client using I3 adopted by of ZONAR Secretary of
Technology NAR InfoObjects Defense
to XML syntax
In the Fall of 1993, ZONAR was engaged by REALTRON Corporation to design and implement their "next
generation" Real Estate Multiple Listing Service product. The product included a Windows desktop client program that communicated with the legacy database servers already in place throughout the United States. ZONAR
determined that a single desktop client program that could communicate with diverse databases was best implemented through the use of information objects to encapsulate the information. These objects contained elements from the
legacy databases mapped to a comprehensive, standard dictionary. Development of the semantic concepts used in the defining and mapping processes required thousands of man-hours of research into the nature of informational
relationships. The resulting semantic standard facilitated integration of information from multiple sources and allowed expert processing to be included in the client without need for an understanding of the various server
schemas. This was the birth of ZONAR’s Intelligent Information Interchange (I3) technology.
In 1995, ZONAR's Real Estate Master Data Dictionary was
adopted by the National Association of REALTORS® for its REALTORS Information Network project. ZONAR expanded the semantic dictionary to over 6,000 elements in over 50,000 information "nodes" during the project term.
In 1998, publication of the XML specification signaled the future of XML "Information Objects". ZONAR, through a few punctuation changes, transformed its entire set of information object technology to XML compliance.
In 2000, the Office for the Secretary of Defense contracted with ZONAR for the consolidation of five separate departmental databases. Initial study revealed that requiring all the departments to use a common database would
actually lead to a decrease in processing efficiency. In order to achieve the desired goal of giving each department access to the data of the others without disrupting current operation, ZONAR proposed a system to share
information based on a publish/subscribe model. That system, using I3 technology to process information objects derived from standard government forms, was the first implementation of ZONAR’s Information Sharing System (ISS).