Ontology-based patterns for the integration of business processes and enterprise application architectures

Increasingly, enterprises are using Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as an approach to Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). SOA has the potential to bridge the gap between business and technology and to improve the reuse of existing applications and the interoperability with new ones. In addition to service architecture descriptions, architecture abstractions like patterns and styles capture design knowledge and allow the reuse of successfully applied designs, thus improving the quality of software. Knowledge gained from integration projects can be captured to build a repository of semantically enriched, experience-based solutions. Business patterns identify the interaction and structure between users, business processes, and data. Specific integration and composition patterns at a more technical level address enterprise application integration and capture reliable architecture solutions. We use an ontology-based approach to capture architecture and process patterns. Ontology techniques for pattern definition, extension and composition are developed and their applicability in business process-driven application integration is demonstrated

Service architecture design for E-Businesses: A pattern-based approach

E-business involves the implementation of business processes over the Web. At a technical level, this imposes an application integration problem. In a wider sense, the integration of software and business levels across organisations becomes a significant challenge. Service architectures are an increasingly adopted architectural approach for solving Enterprise Applications Integration (EAI). The adoption of this new architectural paradigm requires adaptation or creation of novel methodologies and techniques to solve the integration problem. In this paper we present the pattern-based techniques supporting a methodological framework to design service architectures for EAI. The techniques are used for services identification, for transformation from business models to service architectures and for architecture modifications

INTEGRATION VERSUS DEDICATION IN ROMANIAN MANAGEMENT SUPPORT SYSTEMS

The technologies supporting future business must be intuitive from a user standpoint, flexible from design standpoint and highly productive. As an answer to many requirements, analysts recommend the inclusion of SOA and ESB in the IT management strategies, since these tend to become mainstream, overcoming their abstract vision status in the last decade. In this paper, we provide a study regarding the attitude of companies from north-western Romania with respect to this transition and the SOA&ESB models. Our analysis targets attributes such as: level of understanding, knowledge and concern in adopting such technologies, the management involvement in the company IT strategy, the added value of the new technologies and risk factors for the migration towards an SOA&ESB architecture.integration,enterprise applications,web applications,SOA,ESB,framework

Supporting Semantically Enhanced Web Service Discovery for Enterprise Application Integration

The availability of sophisticated Web service discovery mechanisms is an essential prerequisite for increasing the levels of efficiency and automation in EAI. In this chapter, we present an approach for developing service registries building on the UDDI standard and offering semantically-enhanced publication and discovery capabilities in order to overcome some of the known limitations of conventional service registries. The approach aspires to promote efficiency in EAI in a number of ways, but primarily by automating the task of evaluating service integrability on the basis of the input and output messages that are defined in the Web service’s interface. The presented solution combines the use of three technology standards to meet its objectives: OWL-DL, for modelling service characteristics and performing fine-grained service matchmaking via DL reasoning, SAWSDL, for creating semantically annotated descriptions of service interfaces, and UDDI, for storing and retrieving syntactic and semantic information about services and service providers

Integration of Information Technologies in Enterprise Application Development

Healthcare enterprises are disconnected. In the era of integrated information systems and Internet explosion, the necessity of information systems integration reside from business process evolution, on the one hand, and from information technology tendencies, on the other hand. In order to become more efficient and adaptive to change, healthcare organizations are tremendously preoccupied of business process automation, flexibility and complexity. The need of information systems integration arise from these goals, explaining, at the same time, the special interest in EAI. Extensible software integration architectures and business orientation of process modeling and information systems functionalities, the same as open-connectivity, accessibility and virtualization lead to most suitable integration solutions: SOA and BPM architectural styles in a cloud computing environment

Extensible Architectures: The Strategic Value of Service Oriented Architecture in Banking

Information and communication technology (ICT) has helped to drive increasingly intense global competition. In turn, this intensity increases the need for flexibility and rapid changeability in ICT to support strategies that depend on organizational agility. We report a comparative, cross-cultural case study of the implementation of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) at a Scandinavian bank and a Swiss bank. The strategic rewards in the adoption of SOA appear to go beyond marketplace issues of ICT capability acquisition, and unexpectedly arise in the creation of an extensible organizational ICT architecture. The extensibility of the ICT architecture that results from the adoption of SOA provides potential for greater organizational agility (and thereby competitiveness)

Feasibility of SOA in a Legacy Environment

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is currently viewed as the “silver bullet” solution for all of the integration issues that a business faces in this very competitive world. SOA technologies vendors would also like everyone to believe the “silver bullet” myth. While there is definitely some truth to the notion of SOA being able to solve many integration issues, SOA does not apply to all integration issues and it should not be considered as the only technology solution. The core argument is whether SOA is a technology or a methodology. Most experts will argue that it is a methodology with definite software architecture pattern, but many case studies have shown that it is a complete mindset change, a new ideology as to how software should be created to solve business problems. This ideology of SOA has been around for decades in many forms and it is coming to fruition as the internet is creating the concept of a global information village. The global information village is giving people the opportunity to enhance communication and find solutions to all sorts of problems eliminating the need to recreate solutions. The idea of reusability is catching up very fast and that’s where SOA is claiming most of it benefits like speed to market and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) for software development. SOA is definitely not for everyone, especially for environments that are accustomed to legacy technologies and associated software development practices. There is a limited scope for SOA in legacy environments and not all problems can be solved with SOA. For instance if a company already has a monolithic system that is performance oriented and is meeting the needs of the business, then future enhancements will never dictate the need for SOA as the initial investment into SOA is very high. From a performance perspective, a monolithic system will always be faster since network latency due to dispersed and segregated multiple computing engines integration is the nature of SOA. A good application of SOA in the legacy environment would be e-commerce where monolithic system capabilities can be abstracted out and made web enabled. In this approach one does not have to rewrite its monolithic system but only use SOA to define a new interface to interact with the monolithic system