Flow-based Adaptive Information Integration

Abstract

Assembling a coherent view of distributed heterogeneous information and their processing is challenging but important for inter-organizational business collaboration and service provision. However, traditional integration approaches do not consider dynamic and adaptive issues such as human intervention and exception handling. Therefore, we propose a Workflow-based Information Integration (WII) approach, which is particularly suitable in a loosely coupled Web services environment. Our implementation framework comprises five layers: semantic, application, workflow, service, and message. We focus on the workflow layer for providing adaptiveness from the aspects of various types of flows such as controlflows, data-flows, security-flows, exception-flows and semantic-flows by using the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL). We further extend this with our proposed data-integration, semantic-referencing, and exception-handling assertions in order to achieve dynamic and adaptive workflow-based information integration plans. We map information into SOAP messages and link the proposed exception-handling assertions in BPEL to SOAP-fault implementations. We also define semantic referencing in BPEL by using OWL Web Ontology Language. Lastly, we demonstrate the feasibility of our adaptive approach with an intelligence information integration case study at the application layer and examine some typical use cases of exception-handling with semantic support.