Towards Comprehensive Data Integration Mechanisms in Industrial Enterprises and E-Commerce Applications

摘要

Today many industrial enterprises have to meet several challenges like individual customer production, enterprise resource planning, electronic market places, B2C and B2B communication as well as E-commerce applications. In this context supporting information systems are required, which allow the integration of heterogeneous software systems and the corresponding data sources in order to optimize both collaboration of in-house software components and data communication with other business partners. For industrial enterprises efficient management of product data is of major importance because it significantly increases the productivity of engineers and organizations that deal with information involved in the process of designing, manufacturing and maintaining a product. Electronic data interchange (EDI) is the most important prerequisite for electronic collaboration and E-commerce applications. This paper introduces a rule-based product data manager to enable integrated management of a large amount of product data as well as data interchange between several CIM components. To provide flexible and easy-to-use EDI mechanisms with other business partners or between different CIM components, a configurable interface for EDI is introduced. In this approach knowledge about data structures and data formats is separated from the file generation process. This knowledge is transformed into a meta data structure represented by XML DTDs. Data transmission is done by making use of the advantages of XML and Internet technology.