On the Road to Behavior-Based Integration

Integration of autonomous object-oriented systems requires the integration of object structure and object behaviour. Research in federated information systems has so far mainly addressed integration of object structure. The integration of object behaviour carries with it the promise to finally move integration tools beyond the state of the art at which they have (roughyl) existed for the better part of a decade, and we are embarked on a project that examines this problem in terms of object life cycles. The topic is also increasing in actuality since it also applies to the integration of business processes, which is typically required when companies merge or enter into consumer-producer relationships, and results can be expected to naturally extend to the arena of web services. Ultimately, the goal will be to define consistency criteria for behaviour integration and apply them in integration tools that guide the definition of global behavioural views upon autonomous object-oriented systems. Keywords: object-oriented databases, database design, federated information systems, behaviour integration, business process integration, web services, meta-classes