XML in Enterprise Systems: Its Roles and Benefits
Jaroslav Pokorny2010, IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology
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Abstract
Enterprise information integration (EII) requires an accurate, precise and complete understanding of the disparate data sources, the needs of the information consumers, and how these map to the business concepts of the enterprise. In practice, such integration takes place in context of any enterprise information system. In the paper we explain various approaches to EII, its architectures as well as its association to enterprise application integration. We justify why XML technology contributes to finding sufficiently powerful support for EII. We present some features of the XML technology, mainly its database part, and show how it is usable in EII.
Figures (1)
![By [18] EII is defined as the integration of data from multiple systems into a unified, consistent and accurate representation geared toward the viewing and manipulation of the data. Data is aggregated, restructured and relabelled (if necessary) and presented to the user. In viewing EII from a software engineering point of view, it is a type of middleware that allows companies to combine data from disparate sources into a single application. EII is based on a more flexible form of integration than simple data integration. EIT data sources (DS) are viewed by applications as a single virtual database (see Figure 1). EII is based on a framework that exposes rather declarative interface for specification of integration requirements. EI] provides applications a single, virtual view across multiple data sources. Applications access data sources through these views and through only one API of the EII server. Queries are transformed into queries against data sources. In other terminology, this approach is based on mediation. There is also a variant called federation, which integrates data by defining mappings between all pairs of schemas of the member databases. This variant called also a loosely coupled federated system is not broadly applied in real enterprise environment because of the using of private protocol and data model, low](https://figures.academia-assets.com/41163639/figure_001.jpg)
Key takeaways
- After summarizing some basics of XML database technology in Section 3, in Section 4 we focus on applications of XML databases in EII.
- The EII server is a virtual XML database.
- As a consequence there are XML databases without any schema.
- XML databases enable EII by providing a platform for querying across heterogeneous data sources, resulting in view of all common entities spread across enterprise systems or services.
- We have seen that EII products fall into two categories, those that grew from an RDBMS background and those that emerged from the XML world.
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