David Linthicum

The transformation layer is the "Rosetta stone" of the system. It understands the format of all information being transmitted among the applications and translates that information on the fly, restructuring data from one message so that it makes sense to the receiving application... (more)

When dealing with application integration, as you know by now, we are dealing with much complexity. The notion of ontologies helps the application integration architect prepare generalizations that make the problem domain more understandable. In contrast to abstraction, generaliz... (more)

Application integration brings a combination of problems. Each organization and trading community has its own set of integration issues that must be addressed. Because of this, it is next to impossible to find a single technological solution set and/or standard that can be applie... (more)

Web services holds the promise of moving beyond the simple exchange of information - the dominating mechanism for application integration today - to the concept of accessing application services that are encapsulated within old and new applications. This means organizations can n... (more)

While there are many standards that look like ebXML, ebXML is the first horizontal standard designed to address the exchange of information and adherence to inter-enterprise processes. However, in attempting to reach this lofty goal, ebXML is also a complex standard and takes som... (more)

Many in the world of application integration have begun to adopt the notion of ontology (or the instances of ontology: ontologies). Ontology is a term borrowed from philosophy that refers to the science of describing the kinds of entities in the world and how they are related. O... (more)

Although a number of standards exist for information interchange and process definition, industry standards have yet to emerge for defining common integration server and B2B integration server services such as routing, rules processing, and transformation. In the absence of such ... (more)

Fundamentally, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is about loosely coupling applications and data stores together to solve intraenterprise business problems. Its strength is facilitating the free flow of information from any system to any other system, one-to-one or many-to... (more)