E-Business Lecture 4B Flashcards
Definition of Interoperability
The ability of two or more applications to pass data and services to each other.
Interoperability is a serious impediment to developing cross enterprise applications
What are the two main problems of interoperability?
- e-Business implementations automate only a small portion of the business transaction process
- e-Business must be based on a common set of protocols and standard processes
Name 5 characteristics of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)
- Key enabling technology to help organizations to achieve intra-enterprise integrations and drive operational efficiency
- It is a strategy that does not specify products, tools or technology for its inception
- Provides the infrastructure to reuse, rapidly connect, interface and unify information
- Represents both the products as well as the processes of integrating new & legacy applications with data files & databases
- It is non-intrusive
What are the two types of messaging?
- Synchronous
2. Asynchronous
What are the 4 characteristics of the publish/subscribe interaction model?
- Application communicate by exchanging messages
- Senders do not specify the recipients message they just publish a topic of interest
- Receivers have to subscribe with the middleware for topics of interest
- Middleware retrieves a list of subscribes of a topic and delivers the message
Definition of Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)
It is the back-bone infrastructure that is responsible for relaying data from one application to another by putting it in a uniform message format
What are the 3 features that make MOM particularly attrictive
- Prioritization of requests
- Load balancing
- Synchronous/asynchronous messaging
What are the 3 typical EAI topologies for the Publish/Subscribe model
- Technologies use subject or topic names as the loosely coupled link between publishers and subscribers system
- Publishers produce messages on a particular subject or topic name and subscribers receive those messages by registering interest in the subject name
- Modern publish-subscribe EAI messaging tools are based on the multicast model where messages are published by being sent once & are receiver simultaneously by all subscribers
What are the 3 typical EAI topologies for the Hub & Spoke model
- A central node manages all interactions between applications. Each application does not have to integrate multiple times with several other applications, it simply carries out one integration process on the central node
- The central node handles communication with other applications
- The most popular hub and spoke EAI solution is integration brokering
What are the 3 EAI Integration Layers?
- Business Process Integration Layer
- Data Integration Layer
- Transport Integration Layer (not relevant for now)
What is the Data Integration Layer?
Data integration is the ability to share & exchange relevant business data from a variety of sources and integrate it with other such related data items despite differences in data formats, structures and intended meaning of business terms under possibly diverse company standards
What are the 3 Data Integration Challenges and name 4 examples per challenge
- Entity Definition Conflicts
- Naming conflicts
- DB Identifier conflicts
- Attribute equivalence
- Granularity
- Missing attributes - Domain Definition conflicts
- Data Representation
- Data Dimensions
- Data Scaling
- Data Precision - Data Value Conflicts
- Known Inconsistency
- Temporal Inconsistency
- Value inconsistencies
- Value conflicts
- Range value inconsistencies
What are the 3 benefits of EAI?
- Lower development costs
- Lower opportunity costs
- Lower maintenance costs
