No abstract
The theme for this special issue-information integration-reflects the growing importance of integration in general, and data integration in particular, as a driving force in information technology spending. This essay discusses information integration along three axes-data types, federation, and intelligence. Several important problem areas are emerging-storage and retrieval of XML (Extensible Markup Language) documents, federation and distribution across data sources, and holistic intelligence across different data modalities. This special issue is devoted to papers on many of these topics, and we expect this to be an active area of research for many years to come.Integration is the driving force of this decade of IT (information technology) spending. As enterprises buy more and more packaged applications, it is estimated that the task of combining these application "silos" results in over 40 percent of the IT spending, even though the amount of code written for integration is significantly smaller than 40 percent. This is because integration projects tend to be one-of-akind, and complex to write. The question for software and services vendors is this: can the cost of integration be reduced to be more in line with that of packaged applications?The essay is organized as follows. This section describes four integration models. The next section gives an overview of information integration. Following sections then explore some of the technical challenges along the three axes that are the basis for our model of information integration. Finally, we end with some conclusions.There are four distinct forms of integration: 1. Portals (or "at-the-glass") integration is the shallowest form, bringing potentially disparate applications together in a (typically Web) single entry point. 2. Business-process integration orchestrates processes across application and possibly enterprise boundaries, such as those involved in a supplychain relationship. Web services and their derivatives are becoming important here. 3. Application integration, in which applications that do similar or complementary things communicate with each other, is typically focused on data transformation and message queuing, increasingly in the XML (Extensible Markup Language) domain. 4. Information integration, wherein complementary data are either physically (through warehousing tools) or logically brought together, makes it possible for applications to be written to and make use of all the relevant data in the enterprise, even if the data are not directly under their control. A typical example of this would be a new customer relationship application that combines the relational call log with the speech-to-text translated call itself.
Over the last few years, object-orientation has gained more and more importance within several disciplines of computer science (e.g. programming languages, knowledge engineering, and database systems). Numerous papers have defined one or another of its underlying concepts (sometimes in quite different ways), and some systems have been developed following those heterogeneous definitions. Nevertheless, papers investigating the dependencies and degrees of freedom of these concepts are rarely found. For this reason, the goal of this paper is not to add yet another definition of object-oriented concepts, but to identify existing relationships among these basic concepts that allow one to cover and classify various conceivable combinations of these conceptual building blocks. Dependencies, orthogonalities, and relations among concepts like object identity, encapsulation, classification, generalization, inheritance, etc. are revealed, showing numerous ways to compose different shades of object-orientation. This leads to alternatives encountered when constructing object-oriented systems, which are illustrated by classifying some well-known systems and prototypes from different areas. However, it is not our purpose to analyze the relative importance of these concepts. Instead, we investigate the concepts from a neutral point of view, presenting (but not evaluating) several degrees of object-orientation.
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