Schemas are a critical component of the service contract. They not only announce the data model that a service recognizes, but more conceptually, they allow our service to adhere to the principles laid out in previous chapters. Abstraction is a key aspect of SOA, and a well-built schema provides a sufficient level of opaqueness to the underlying service processing. Interoperability, another vital piece of a far-reaching service, should be taken into consideration at the earliest phases of schema design. Finally, the concept of reusability is readily embraced in schema design, and we will see numerous examples in this chapter.

Let's now look at a series of ways in which we can apply these service-oriented principles to schemas designed in BizTalk Server 2013. Throughout this chapter, I will use examples that revolve around receiving details about a subject's activities in an ongoing clinical drug trial. This includes actions such as enrolling into a trial,...