Federated Information Systems Research Articles

A federated information system framework for vertical integration

The convergence of operational and information technology in the era of Industry 4.0 has significantly increased the volume of data being generated on the manufacturing shop floors. Current research trends have focused on integrating this data with information present throughout the different systems in manufacturing facilities from Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to Manufacturing Execution System (MES) software, otherwise known as vertical integration. More specifically, previous works have looked at aggregating this data being read from Open Platform Communication Unified Architecture (OPC UA) servers by utilizing centralized aggregation servers to create information systems. This article, however, proposes a framework that adopts a federated information system designed to fulfill the manufacturing industry’s requirements and is capable of connecting to different OPC UA servers and storing the data within knowledge graph-based information models. GraphQL servers are also utilized in this system for easy accessibility of information by users. This system provides modularity, scalability, and interoperability to supplement the capabilities of information systems previously implemented. A prototype was also developed in this article for a federated information system for a boiler monitoring system.

Implementation of a Federated Information System by Means of Reuse of Research Data Archived in Research Data Repositories

Implementation of a Federated Information System by Means of Reuse of Research Data Archived in Research Data Repositories

Fine-grained federation of geographic information services through metadata aggregation

Large scale Geographic Information Systems (GIS) require experts from different areas, such as data maintenance and handling, data rendering and displaying, and data processing. However, it is challenging to host data, processing capabilities, and experts in the same geographical location. To enable remote coupling of these data and processing services, interoperable distributed system architectures have been developed. This paper presents a distributed Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) framework for understanding and managing the production of knowledge from distributed observations, simulations, and analyses through integrated data-views. Open GIS standards enable us to develop such a distributed framework by defining the standard common data models and corresponding web service components. The composability nature of these components has inspired us to develop a federated information system framework enabling both application-based hierarchical data definitions and performance enhancing designs. Key words: Geographic information systems, federation, web services, data models, metadata.

Editorial "Earth and Space Science Informatics: informatics in oceanography"

A decade ago, information was discrete and disconnected, assembling data from many different sources was inherently time consuming, and was made for specific studies, such as evaluation of trends in ecosystems, climatology productions, etc. Most of the data were not directly accessible, but were sent by mail on CD-ROMs or floppy discs. The world is changed and the collection of digital data is growing at an exponential rate, making the access to data more difficult than before. During the last decade, with the advent of Internet-based system architectures a fundamental shift has occurred. The digitization of all kinds of data, the implementation of computer networks and the availability of broad band have posed the basis for the connection of a vast amount of data and information. Internet, Web, distributed information systems and computing infrastructures have been changing the working way in science, engineering, business, and education. Today, advances in all kind of application domains is often related with the possibilities to access heterogeneous information and the related tools to understand and use them. Different scientific and technological communities are today working together to develop federated information systems by applying interoperability solutions and recognising that: ‐ Data in the Earth sciences is being used by a far broader community than ever before. ‐ Information harvesting by selecting the appropriate, exchange metadata, the evolving interoperability standards, and the multi-disciplinary scenarios raises important and difficult challenges.

Extending Loosely Coupled Federated Information Systems Using Agent Technology

Different FIPA-compliant agent development platforms are available for developing multiagent systems. FIPA compliance ensures interoperability among agents across different platforms. Although most agent implementation platforms provide some form of white- and yellow-page functionalities to advertise and identify agent roles and descriptions, there are no clear architectural standards that define how an agent community can effortlessly adapt to operate in a federated information system (FIS) where new content sources are constantly added or changes are made to existing content sources. This article presents a framework based on the semantic Web vision to address extensibility in a loosely coupled FIS.

CaCORE version 3: Implementation of a model driven, service-oriented architecture for semantic interoperability

One of the requirements for a federated information system is interoperability, the ability of one computer system to access and use the resources of another system. This feature is particularly important in biomedical research systems, which need to coordinate a variety of disparate types of data. In order to meet this need, the National Cancer Institute Center for Bioinformatics (NCICB) has created the cancer Common Ontologic Representation Environment (caCORE), an interoperability infrastructure based on Model Driven Architecture. The caCORE infrastructure provides a mechanism to create interoperable biomedical information systems. Systems built using the caCORE paradigm address both aspects of interoperability: the ability to access data (syntactic interoperability) and understand the data once retrieved (semantic interoperability). This infrastructure consists of an integrated set of three major components: a controlled terminology service (Enterprise Vocabulary Services), a standards-based metadata repository (the cancer Data Standards Repository) and an information system with an Application Programming Interface (API) based on Domain Model Driven Architecture. This infrastructure is being leveraged to create a Semantic Service-Oriented Architecture (SSOA) for cancer research by the National Cancer Institute’s cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG™).

A Web Service Architecture for Revenue-Earning Information Products

Industries are adopting Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) for multi-organizational federated information systems where there is synergistic value in combined services. By contributing information services to the federation, each participant benefits from integrated access to services provided by other participants. However, integrated information services for use by external customers, based on SOA, are rare. One reason for this is the absence of technical mechanisms for information providers to share in the financial rewards associated with the provision of integrated information products to end customers. This article explores issues associated with the design of charging mechanisms within SOAs that permit dynamic composition of services in order to achieve customer goals. It proposes a suite of service components that can implement charging functions and explains their application within an application scenario. The scenario concerns an integrated service that is of interest to customers in local government practice, sociological research, and real property investment.

Report on the Engineering Federated Information Systems 2003 workshop (EFIS 2003)

This paper summarizes the EFIS 2003 workshop, held in Coventry, U.K. in July, as part of Coventry University's Data Horizons Week. Major research issues discussed include metadata/ontologies, integration frameworks, data quality and evolution, and mobile interfaces. Topics for future work include evolution, expressiveness, maintenance, and dissemination of FIS.

A web-based federated neuroinformatics model for surgical planning and clinical research applications in epilepsy.

There is an increasing need to efficiently share diverse clinical and image data among different clinics, labs, and departments of a medical center enterprise to facilitate better quality care and more effective clinical research. In this paper, we describe a web-based, federated information model as a viable technical solution with applications in medical refractory epilepsy and other neurological disorders. We describe four such online applications developed in a federated system prototype: surgical planning, image analysis, statistical data analysis, and dynamic extraction, transforming, and loading (ETL) of data from a heterogeneous collection of data sources into an epilepsy multimedia data warehouse (EMDW). The federated information system adopts a three-tiered architecture, consisting of a user-interface layer, an application logic layer, and a data service layer. We implemented two complementary federated information technologies, i.e., XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), in the prototype to enable multimedia data exchange and brain images transmission. The preliminary results show that the federated prototype system provides a uniform interface, heterogeneous information integration and efficient data sharing for users in our institution who are concerned with the care of patients with epilepsy and who pursue research in this area.

Information Integration and Information Strategies for Adaptive Enterprises

Enterprise information systems, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), have often been criticized for their rigidity. Alternatively, global, matrixed enterprises often follow a federated information systems approach. The first type of enterprises, which we call the standardized enterprises, lack flexibility, while the second type, which we call decentralized enterprises, lack visibility. To create what we shall call an adaptive enterprise the information systems strategy should achieve both these goals: visibility and flexibility. I discuss the problems associated with the lack of either of these two, and how information integration technology, within the enterprise application integration space, can lead to the creation of adaptive enterprises.

Research and practice in federated information systems

EFIS 2000 was held at Dublin City University in June 2000. The principal aim of this third workshop was to bring together new insights from academic research with industry-driven developments and perspectives in the area of federated information systems. This report describes the observations of the workshop together with the outcome and future research possibilities.

Engineering federated information systems

After the successful first International Workshop on Engineering Federated Database Systems (EFDBS'97) in Barcelona in June 1997 [CEH + 97], the goal of this second workshop was to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in various issues in the development of federated information systems, whereby the scope has been extended to cover database and non-database information sources (the change from EFDBS to EFIS reflects this). This report provides details of the workshop content and the conclusions reached in the final discussion.

Coordinating distributed organizational knowledge

As organizations move from hierarchical towards market-like structures, their distributed units also take a larger role in the design and evolution of organizational information systems. This requires strategies which support the cooperative creation, evaluation and evolution of global information flow structures among autonomous organizational units through local knowledge acquisition and maintenance. Three such strategies are presented: cooperative conceptual modeling, multi-simulation, and explicit process support. These strategies are formally embedded in a meta modeling framework and implemented with a repository-based architecture. They are intended for the analysis of business processes in networked organizations, and as a basis for designing and evolving their federated information systems.

Application of a System Architecture Standard to a Federated Information System

ABSTRACTThis paper describes the results of applying a system architecture standard during the development of a federated information system. A description of the system and the application of the standard to describe the architecture of the system are provided. Observations concerning the application of the standard are made, including description of the modifications in applying the standard in a federated environment, as well as, general comments about the necessity of using architectural styles and views.

Integrating modelling systems for environmental management information systems

Special purpose modelling packages can become more accessible and more effective for decision support when integrated into a spatial information system. Integration is made difficult by differences in the models due to scope, underlying data models, and command languages. This paper extends a federated information systems design methodology and architecture by identifying parallels of the model integration problem with the database integration problem in federated database design. A schema architecture is proposed together with associated schema translation functions. The role of a problem statement, analogous to a federated database query, is defined. Our design approach is demonstrated in HYDRA, a decision support system for water quality management.