Chapter 111 - Champagne: Data Change Propagation for Heterogeneous Information Systems

Abstract

The IT infrastructures of many enterprises are highly diversified, and both applications and data management systems are constantly evolving. The integration of data as well as of functionality is generally termed enterprise application integration (EAI). Flexible methods supporting the data interchange between autonomous information systems are important for today's increasingly heterogeneous enterprise IT infrastructures. Updates, insertions, and deletions of data objects in autonomous information systems often have to trigger data changes in other autonomous systems, even if the distributed systems are not integrated into a global schema. One suggests a solution to this problem based on the propagation and transformation of data using several eXtensible Markup Language (XML) technologies. The prototype manages dependencies between the schemas of distributed data sources and allows defining and processing of arbitrary actions on changed data by manipulating all dependent data sources. The prototype comprises a propagation engine that interprets scripts based on a workflow specification language, a data dependency specification tool, a system administration tool, and a repository that stores all relevant information for these tools.