Business Data Catalog

The Business Data Catalog (BDC) is a new subsystem within Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS).  To the best of my understanding, the BDC wraps disparate data repositories from around your enterprise in a single, programmatically accessible object model.  The functionality of the object model is apparently driven by meta data that describes the underlying repositories. The idea is that the data from these other sources now becomes available to SharePoint data driven modules like lists and web parts.

This is cool, but remains a half step away from meaningful.

I am making this up, but meaningful might look like this:

The BDC is a standalone, enterprise accessible service that exposes disparate data sources within your enterprise.  Think of the BDC as UDDI+WSDL for databases. The BDC provides a lookup mechanism and abstraction layer for all your data systems thereby making the platforms irrelevant to your business tier.  Further, data sources are now discoverable via the meta data that describes them and accessible via the open standards supported in WCF.

I am not sure what to do with this idea, or if I have it explained it well. If you get it, do you agree that, “Man!  That’d be sweet”?