Enterprise Information Integration

Enterprise Information Integration or EII, is a process of information integration, using data abstraction to provide a single interface (known as uniform data access) for viewing all the data within an organization, and a single set of structures and naming conventions (known as uniform information representation) to represent this data; the goal of EII is to get a large set of heterogeneous data sources to appear to a user or system as a single, homogeneous data source.

EII challenges

Data within an enterprise can be stored in various formats, including relational databases (which themselves come in a large number of varieties), text files, XML files, spreadsheets and a variety of proprietary storage methods, each with their own indexing and data access methods.

EII standards

Standardized data access APIs have emerged, that offer a specific set of commands to retrieve and modify data from a generic data source. Many applications exist that implement these APIs' commands across various data sources, most notably relational databases. Such APIs include ODBC, JDBC, OLE DB, and more recently ADO.NET.

There are also standard formats for representing data within a file, that are very important to information integration. The best-known of these is XML, which has emerged as a standard universal representation format. There are also more specific XML "grammars" defined for specific types of data, such as Geography Markup Language for expressing geographical features, and Directory Service Markup Language, for holding directory-style information. In addition, non-XML standard formats exist, such as iCalendar, for representing calendar information, and vCard, for business card information.

Uses of EII

EII products enable loose coupling between -data consuming client applications and services and heterogeneous-data stores. Such client applications and services include Desktop Productivity Tools (spreadsheets, word processors, presentation software, etc.), Development Environments and Frameworks (Java EE, .NET, Mono, SOAP or RESTian Web services, etc.), business intelligence (BI), business activity monitoring (BAM) software, enterprise resource planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Business Process Management (BPM and/or BPEL) Software, and web content management.

ee also

*Federated database system
*Web 2.0
*Web services
*Metadata repository
*Data integration
*Semantic integration
*Semantic Web
*Business Intelligence 2.0 (BI 2.0)
*Enterprise Application Integration
*Data Warehouse
*Service-Oriented Modeling

Data access technologies

*ADO.NET
*JDBC
*ODBC
*OLE DB
*XQuery
*Service Data Objects (SDO) for Java, C++ and .Net clients and any type of data source

References

Integration using Data Services http://dev2dev.bea.com/pub/a/2005/06/data_integration.html -Manu M.R