INFORMATION INTEGRATION ARCHITECTURE Chapter 8 GBR OVERVIEW One

INFORMATION INTEGRATION ARCHITECTURE Chapter 8 GBR

OVERVIEW • One of the reoccurring themes in this course has been the lack of standards as a roadblock to why many types of integration advancements have not occurred more rapidly. With regards to data, progress has been made with the emergence of XML as a data format standard. We are explorers and pioneers • Organizations have also realized that the data they have is very valuable and the more control they have over it the better they can use it to make improvements to their business. • All in all, information and data are at the heart of every integration project. How does this apply to your project?

OVERVIEW • One of the challenges in information integration is there are many types of formats of data. • We must find away to take all of these different types of data formats and different structures and make them accessible to the entire enterprise. This is the goal • The solution is to take the data and represent it in recognized format. This recognized format allows data to be reusable and decreases operational cost and time. This is why it is important • This is the reason XML has gained so much popularity. It provides a standard format but ironically there really is no alternative to XML.

METADATA • Now that we have a way to share data we must make sure it is correct. We cant have incorrect information running throughout the enterprise. • To provide value, meaning and integrity of data we use metadata. Metadata is information about the data. The more descriptive and accurate the data, the better we can integrate it. • There are many tools available to aid organizations in automatically gathering data. Very Useful! Because of this usefulness of metadata tools can be expensive. The thought process for using one of these tools is it will be an good investment because it will pay it self off through increased quality, reuse of data, and decreased time and cost. • Metadata is not just nice to have but a necessity in enterprise architecture. The reason why is how the information about systems can be represented, which is the foundation of successful integration.

UNDERSTANDING METADATA • Data in systems represents business entities, such as customers, employees, products and more. • Metadata, the information describing the data, enables the information to be probed, reported on, consolidated, synchronized, and integrated. • Of major importance is the quality of data. Garbage in = garbage out. Thus, information needs to accurate. This requires semantic and syntactic validation. • Semantic validation ensures the information makes sense. • Syntactic validation ensures the data is correctly formatted.

UNDERSTANDING METADATA • A standard metadata model includes information to enable syntactic validation and enables automation of translation, transformation, and delivery of data to the target systems. • However it does not include metadata that defines the semantic meaning including the context, relationships, and dependencies. Entity Relationships diagrams are often used for this purpose. However, Entity relationships are used in the discovery phase and design phase. • The semantic meaning has not traditionally been part of metadata and this limitation has had a number of implications. Right format but missing complete understanding. Thoughts?

UNDERSTANDING METADATA • Because there is no cross application rules, we will need to create custom codes. These custom codes will slow down the implementation solution. • The semantic issue and lack of cross application rules presents a problem because we want to keep the value of the data in a reusable manner. • Today there are many efforts to solve this weakness so metadata can be fully expressed and protect the full meaning and value of an enterprises information. • Summary – metadata is not perfected but without question there is great importance to data. Thoughts? Maybe we are at a potential phase

METADATA ARCHITECTURE • There are many different types of metadata for describing different aspects. Most people are familiar with metadata that describes the information in the system. • However, this type of metadata does not define transaction and processing rules. These rules must be defined in the enterprise integration solutions. • A useful framework for understanding the different layers of metadata is the Object Management Group framework. Each layer provides a higher level of functionality. • Layer 0 – the bottom layer, is the actual information and data.

METADATA ARCHITECTURE • Level 1 – is the metadata layer that describes the information. • Level 2 – the metamodel layer is where the semantic meaning is added. The metamodel is an abstract language that defines both the structure and semantics of the metadata. • Level 3 – is the meta-metamodel which is an abstract language for defining different kinds of metadata. Essentially it is a repository or warehouse. • Each layer in the OMG metadata architecture increases the level of reuse and efficiency and makes integration an easier task.

METADATA ARCHITECTURE

METADATA STANDARDS • Standards are very important for enabling metadata. Problem is like other issues in enterprise integration is there is not one true standard, there are many. • The next section will cover some of the more popular standards that you may interact with. You can make your own too • World Wide Web Consortium (W 3 C) • The organization for the advancement of structured information standards (OASIS) • Object Management Group (OMG) • Open Applications Group (OAG)

WORLD WIDE WEB CONSORTIUM (W 3 C) • The World Wide Web Consortium (W 3 C) is responsible for a number of web standards. Their focus is on the evolving metadata standard, the semantic web. • The semantic web ensures that web information makes sense by providing a representation of data on the web that includes the meaning. • The semantic web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well defined meaning allowing for people and computers to work together. Examples, Google? • Part of the semantic web is ontology which defines common terms to describe a subject, basic categories, and their relations. EX. Class, properties, and relations.

THE ORGANIZATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF STRUCTURED INFORMATION STANDARDS (OASIS) • OASIS is a not for profit worldwide consortium focused on e-business standards. • OASIS promotes industry consensus and produces worldwide standards for security, Internet of Things, cloud computing, energy, content technologies, emergency management, and other areas. OASIS open standards offer the potential to lower cost, stimulate innovation, grow global markets, and protect the right of free choice of technology. • Interesting fact - Office Open XML, a Microsoft document format competes with OASIS's ISO/IEC 26300 standard.

OBJECT MANAGEMENT GROUP (OMG) • The Object Management Group® (OMG®) is an international, open membership, not-for -profit technology standards consortium, founded in 1989. • OMG developed Model-driven architecture (MDA), a software design approach for the development of software systems. It provides a set of guidelines for the structuring of specifications, which are expressed as models. Model-driven architecture is a kind of domain engineering, and supports model-driven engineering of software systems. Like this?

OPEN APPLICATIONS GROUP (OAG) • The Open Applications Group builds interoperability standards in a community of members where people of all industries come together in an Open Standards Environment. • OAG has an integration standard called OAGIS. • Open Applications Group Integration Specification (OAGIS): defines a common content model and common messages for communication between business applications. This includes application-to-application (A 2 A) and business-to-business (B 2 B) integration.

FINAL THOUGHTS ON METADATA • Metadata management is becoming essential for business agility enabling rapid integration. • Whatever standard you choose the point is to maximize reuse and decrease operational costs. • Most enterprises get to the second layer, the upper layers can be more elusive. Why? • Metadata is a considerable investment in time and cost with the goal of increasing reuse, maximize ROI for integration. Thoughts?

INFORMATION INTEGRATION PATTERNS • There are two types of information integration: aggregation and publishing. • Information aggregation is bringing together information from multiple sources into a single metadata model that provides a single view of the data across systems. • EX. A call center application that provides a unified view of the relationship with a customer rather than requiring the operators to use different systems to preform the same task. • Information publishing is pushing information into multiple back end systems. • EX. Allowing a customer to change his or hers own address across systems.

INFORMATION INTEGRATION PATTERNS • Another view is the one-to-many publishing view which may require support across several systems. • If a customer has several different relationships or accounts they may have different information in each. • EX. One account owner has a loan, checking account, credit card. mortgage, savings account. • This can cause many issues and is one of the major integration reasons.

ENTERPRISE INFORMATION INTEGRATION TECHNOLOGY • Enterprise information integration technology is the ability to support a unified view of data and information for an entire organization. EII is a process of information integration, using data abstraction to provide a unified 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 diverse data sources to appear to a user or system as a single, standardized data source. • Metadata is helpful in streamlining the data that makes EII real. • Sound like a catalog system?

INFORMATION INTEGRATION ARCHITECTURE SPECIFICATION DOCUMENT • So what should you have in your document? • Intro – explains what the document is, which is creating the guide for information integration architecture. • Scope – can be enterprise wide or single project. It defines the business information needs, the relevant metadata, and the underlying integration architecture. • Key participants – identifies all stakeholders in the business information integration.

INFORMATION INTEGRATION ARCHITECTURE SPECIFICATION • Mapping requirements to information integration design patterns – this section is used to identify and map all the requirements to the design patterns for information integration. (See page 152 figure 8 -1) • Data flow diagram – depicts the flow of information. (page 153 figure 8 -2) The purpose is to create a flow diagram of the systems involved. • Metadata model – is used to define access and transformation rules in addition to an analysis tool. The model can also be used as a strategic asset. It ensures data quality by managing access and integrity. It helps maximize the investment in systems knowledge.

INFORMATION INTEGRATION ARCHITECTURE SPECIFICATION • Relationship model – defines the integrity rules across data objects and systems. It gives semantic meaning to the model. (each level has meaning and relation) • Information design reviews – is a guideline for successful design review. This section will be the gold standard in the review process allowing for improvements. The review should have the following: • • All stakeholders are present Explain ground rules for review Criticize the design not the person Designers only explain, they do not defend Identify owners of information Identify systems of record information Define a process for data quality

BEST PRACTICES IN INFORMATION DESIGN • Conduct design reviews – metadata models can become confusing. Reviews must be made to ensure common definitions are correct and understood so stakeholders can utilize the data. • Create a metadata repository – manages metadata, like the Rosetta stone of enterprise data. Data can grow and be built upon. It is important to actively manage this storehouse of information. Catalog? • Manage the repository in the competency center – metadata needs to be managed. The competency center can track and manage how the metadata is used. Library? • Add semantic meaning to the metadata – semantically rich metadata enables the way to finally realize the full value of information. Remember – EX. business domain, the relevant semantic meta data could be company name, ticker symbol, industry, sector, executives, etc.