SITE: Semantic Integration Environment

Investigators: Professor Ray J. Paul, Brunel
Professor Robert D. Macredie, Brunel
   
Collaborators: Unisys
Abbey National
Sainsbury’s
Computer Associates
Princeton Softech
Singularity

EPSRC Funding: £1,336,001

Abstract:

Modern business organisations commonly have multiple banks of data, that interact with multiple business processes, whose output is delivered through a variety of mediums (desktop computers, the Internet and mobile phones for example) to a number of customers, suppliers, partners and the like. Customer relationship management is increasingly important and often mandates a service delivery ideal of 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

This ideal is not easy to deliver. The numerous information systems that a typical organisation uses have typically been developed in isolation and considerable effort is required to ‘glue’ them together when a coherent face needs to be presented to the outside world. Again, typically, each system has a ‘model’ of the business embedded in it, which defines the ‘elements’ that are important to a particular part of the business and the way those elements inter-operate. Consequently, a lot of ‘meaning’ is embedded in a system, which is often implicit in nature, and often conflicts with the meaning embedded in other systems. For example, a dispatch system may deal with ‘customers’ and model them in a certain way, whilst an accounts system may talk of ‘payees’ and model them in a different way. If these systems need to operate together, and ‘customers’ and ‘payees’ are essentially the same thing, clearly there is scope for conflict.

The ‘glue’ that is developed to bind systems together often has to resolve such conflict and is generally used to enable a business process to integrate elements and data across a number of systems. The result is that an organisation has many ‘understandings’ of itself embedded in a number of systems, overlaid by another set of ‘understandings’ about how those systems should work together. In the context of rapid business change - fuelled by new business models, streamlining of business practices, mergers and take-overs and the like - the ability of the underlying systems to respond to that change is severely hampered. Similarly, where inter-operation is at a business-to-business level these difficulties can occur across both sides of the organisational divide as well as between it.

In this context, the aim of the SITE project is to examine whether flexible information systems, driven by the dynamic needs of business, can be achieved using a component-based approach to development. The idealistic metaphor that drives the project is one of a dynamic ‘jigsaw puzzle’ that allows elements of software to be assembled quickly and easily, and changed just as quickly and easily, so that (a) information systems can maintain a closer ‘fit’ with the business and (b) change be enabled more quickly and cost effectively. To do this, however, several areas of existing knowledge need to be investigated and enhanced, including:

In each of these areas, the aim is to refine and improve existing techniques and tools in the light of current shortcomings observed by industrial organisations in practice; the aim is not to ‘reinvent the wheel’.

Contact: Mrs Carolyn Bailey, SITE Project Administrator
Department of Information Systems and Computing
Brunel University
Uxbridge, Middlesex. UB8 3PH.

Telephone: 01895 203323
Facsimile: 01895 251686


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