Without doubt, integration is the mostly costly and challenging task that all companies are facing. We know of a bank with over 40 different call center systems, a financial services company with more than 1,000 databases and a manufacturing company with over 2,000 CAD/CAM systems. The systems have serious difficulties in talking to each other. Several years after enterprise integration technologies and strategies have been first introduced; these companies are still far from reaching the goal of becoming integrated enterprises. In fact, they find it very challenging to simply track all their data sources and the relationships between them.

Your own experience is likely to confirm that these companies are not unique.

Many IT organizations spend up to 80% of their budgets maintaining silo legacy systems leaving limited funds to support new business opportunities or to satisfy new regulatory requirements.

Most enterprises are not able to derive maximum value from its distributed systems and complex, constantly evolving data sources.

Dynamic integration solution based on the Semantic Web standards starts by automatically translating the schemas of the enterprise sources into RDF/OWL. These ‘proxy’ ontologies are used to federate queries from the semantic layer to the underlying data sources. Merging capabilities of RDF make it easy to aggregate the diverse schemas and query across the data sources.

Initial integration can be implemented very quickly. It can also grow over time – using the power of OWL and semantic rules the integration model can be extended to include higher level business concepts and business rules. The model can express the type of knowledge that the users of the systems are interested in storing and accessing, as opposed to the data that represents the knowledge. 

The semantic web integration approach solves many maintenance, evolution and schema compatibility problems by:

• Organizing knowledge in a discrete layer for use by information systems, so that the communication between computer systems can happen in a way independent of the individual system technologies, information architectures and applications.
• Using standards based technology to ensure that this approach does not create yet another island of data and business knowledge. Defining integration models in RDF/OWL keeps them product independent and easy to connect across the entire enterprise.
• Utilizing reasoning technologies to automate many of the integration and query translation tasks

TopQuadrant’s dynamic integration solution is based TopBraid Live and TopBraid Composer products which offer ready to use capabilities to:

• Automatically create dynamic views into relational databases
• Generate SQL queries from the semantic queries
• Import and export schemas and data in the variety of formats including XML, UML and spreadsheets
• Dynamically integrate web content using RSS, microformats and RDFa
• Define and test business ontologies and rule sets