EFFICIENT SYSTEM INTEGRATION USING SEMANTIC REQUIREMENTS AND CAPABILITY MODELS An Approach for Integrating Heterogeneous Business Services

摘要

Business system designers want to integrate heterogeneous legacy systems to provide flexible business services cheaper and faster. Unfortunately, modern integration technologies represent important integration knowledge only implicitly making solutions harder to understand, verify, and maintain. In this paper we propose a data-driven approach, "Semantically-Enabled Externalization of Knowledge" (SEEK), that explicitly models the semantics of integration requirements & capabilities, and data transformations between heterogeneous legacy systems. Goal of SEEK is to make the systems integration process more efficient by providing tool support for quality assurance (QA) steps and generation of system configurations. Based on use cases from industry partners, we compare the SEEK approach with UML-based modeling. In the evaluation context SEEK was found to be more effective to make expert knowledge on system requirements and capabilities available for more efficient tool support and reuse.