Dynamic Intra- and Inter-Enterprise Collaboration Using an Enhanced Multidatabase Architecture

Abstract

Modern intra-and inter-enterprise collaboration requires access to information spread over multiple autonomous and heterogeneous data sources. In this paper we present a loosely coupled multidatabase architecture enhanced with P2P concepts. It achieves a reasonable tradeoff between autonomy and information sharing among both, permanently available and volatile data sources. Each data node decides autonomously which kind of information to share. Data availability, query performance, and up-to-dateness on each participating data node is improved using a pushbased replication strategy, which propagates data modifications over multiple nodes. MotivationSince the first centralized databases found their way into the enterprises in the late 60s, the needs and requirements have changed towards a more distributed management of data. Today there are many corporations which possess a large amount of databases, often spread over different regions or countries and generally connected to a network. These local databases typically raised in an autonomous and independent manner fitting the special needs of the users at the local site. This leads to logical and physical differences in the databases concerning data formats, concurrency control, the data manipulation language, or the data model [8]. It is crucial for a company to keep track of its distributed data in such a heterogeneous environment. Cooperating departments need shared access to this data, to be able to increase their productivity. Multidatabases were introduced for this reason, in order to integrate data from heterogeneous sources. One of the main challenges in the integration of data in such environments is the autonomy of the participating data nodes. This autonomy implies the ability to choose its own database design and operational behavior. Local autonomy is tightly attached to the data ownership, i.e. who is responsible for the correctness, availability, and consistency of the shared data. Centralizing data means to limit local autonomy and revoke the responsibility from the local administrator, which is not reasonable in many cases. A federated architecture for decentralizing data has to balance both, the highest possible local autonomy and a reasonable degree of information sharing [6]. Hence, the architecture of a company wide information system has to be applicable to the data policy of the company and vice versa. To be more precise, the question of data ownership determines the composition of the company wide information platform, while it has to ensure a high level of consistency and fail-safety.In this paper we describe the DÍGAME architecture, a Dynamic Information Grid in an Active Multidatabase Environment, which connects heterogeneous and autonomous data sources to support loosely coupled intra-and inter-enterprise collaboration. We have enhanced the multidatabase architecture of Heimbigner and McLeod [6] with Peer-to-Peer (P2P) concepts to offer a flexible information grid with high data availability to provide each participating node o...

Enabling Support of Collaborative Cross-enterprise Business Processes for Legacy ERP Systems.

“…CBPs are also identified as cross-enterprise [9], cross-organizational [10], multipartner [11], and intra-enterprise [2], [12] processes. The main distinction from inter-enterprise CPSs is that they involve several autonomous enterprises in the business process (BP) execution and without a single centralized management entity.…”

Tightly-Coupled Wrappers with Event Detection Subsystem for Heterogeneous Information Systems

“…In the next steps we finish the implementation of prototypes for a set of different relational databases and evaluate the wrapper architecture in the context of the DÍGAME architecture [6] for a real world scenario. Concurrently we are developing a framework for the implementation and deployment of event notification programs for diverse EADBSs, which shall later be included into a toolbox to assist the creation and setup of wrapper components.…”