ACORD Translator Uses DataXtend® SI to Enable Data Interoperability for Insurance Industry

We’ve been working with the insurance industry’s standards body, ACORD, for a few years now. We created the DataXtend Browser for ACORD so their members would have a way to visualize the importance of data to their overall business, and one of our technologists co-wrote, The ACORD Information Model: A Primer.

Now there’s more exciting news on the ACORD front. Their new tool, the ACORD Translator, is using DataXtend® Semantic Integrator (DXSI) as its mapping and schema generation development environment. The resulting XML services that DXSI generates will ultimately enable insurance industry constituents, from producers and insurers to reinsurers and other parties, to share information, regardless of which data standard or version they use.

At the core of the ACORD Framework is the ACORD Information Model. That model is used as the single source of meaning, the semantic hub to which the individual ACORD XML standards (Property/Casualty/Surety, Life/Health/Annuities, Reinsurance/Large Commercial, and the ACORD Messaging Library) map. DataXtend SI manages the transformation, aggregation, and validation rules that make that possible.

What’s so exciting about this is that now, using the ACORD Information Model as the common model, given a message in any version of any of the standards, you will be able to share it with any of your applications or business partners. The ACORD Translator uses DXSI to migrate the message to the latest version of the appropriate standard, transform it thru the ACORD Information Model to the latest version of the desired target standard, and then migrate it down to the desired version of the target standard.  All of the mappings are maintained through the graphical DataXtend Design Environment - no custom code required!

Shane McCullough, the Chief Enterprise Architect at ACORD, told us, “I am very excited about our new Translator tool. Our job at ACORD is to develop insurance industry standards to meet the requirements of our members and the industry as a whole, but they are not a one-size-fits-all community. With the code that DataXtend generates from the mappings to the Information Model, and our custom designed services, our new ACORD Translator will make data interoperability possible between most of our standards. This will be the first of many tools ACORD is looking to provide to help the industry implement standards.”

The ACORD Translator will debut at the ACORD Implementation Forum (AIF), in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, on October 23. The software will be demonstrated by Donnie Maddox, a Technical Architect with ACORD, in the session, Using the ACORD Translator. Information about the availability of the Translator can be found at www.acord.org.