Enterprise information mashups: Integrating information, simply

Abstract

There is a fundamental transformation that is taking place on the web around information composition through mashups. We first describe this transformation and then assert that this will also affect enterprise architectures. Currently the state-of-the-art in enterprises around information composition is federation and other integration technologies. These scale well, and are well worth the upfront investment for enterprise class, long-lived applications. However, there are many information composition tasks that are not currently well served by these architectures. The needs of Situational Applications (i.e. applications that come together for solving some immediate business problems) are one such set of tasks. Augmenting structured data with unstructured information is another such task. Our hypothesis is that a new class of integration technologies will emerge to serve these tasks, and we call it an enterprise information mashup fabric. In the talk, we discuss the information management primitives that are needed for this fabric, the various options that exist for implementation, and pose several, currently unanswered, research questions. Copyright 2006 VLDB Endowment, ACM.