A system for data change propagation in heterogeneous information systems

Abstract: Today, it is common that enterprises manage several mostly heterogeneous information systems to supply their production and business processes with data. There is a need to exchange data between the information systems while preserving system autonomy. Hence, an integration approach that relies on a single global enterprise data schema is ruled out. This is also due to the widespread usage of legacy systems. We propose a system, called Propagation Manager, which manages dependencies between data objects stored in different information systems. A script specifying complex data transformations and other sophisticated activities, like the execution of external programs, is associated with each dependency. For example, an object update in a source system can trigger data transformations of the given source data for each destination system that depends on the object. Our system is implemented using current XML technologies. We present the architecture and processing model of our system and demonstrate the benefit of our approach by illustrating an extensive example scenario. 1.