Biztalk Schema Question:

A canonical schema is a design pattern, which is applied within a service oriented paradigm, and within BizTalk server context establish the loose coupling between systems. Through performing the transformation of messages from one system to canonical schema and from the canonical schema to message of another system, systems have no direct relation with each other. The canonical schema can also be viewed as an internal schema in BizTalk and aid you in structuring your solution through best practice of creating separate projects for maps, orchestrations, internal and external schemas. Another advantage of using a canonical schema is that it reduces the number of transformations you need. If you need a to map a few types of inbound message coming from different parties to a few outbound messages, you can create a map to your canonical schema for each inbound schema and then a map from your canonical schema to each outbound schema. If for example you have three types of incoming that needs to be mapped to three types of outgoing messages you will only need to build and maintain six maps instead of nine.