In a large modern enterprise, it is inevitable that different portions of the organization will use different systems to produce, store and search their critical data. Competition, evolving technology, mergers, acquisitions, and geographic distribution all contribute to this diversity. Yet, it is only by combining these various systems that the enterprise can realize the full value of the data they contain.
IBM’s vision for information integration offers users access to any data, through any of several APIs, using any of several integration technologies alone or in combination. It creates the illusion of a virtual database containing all data of interest to users. This information infrastructure can be used with other business integration methodologies (such as application integration, workflow, etc). Data can be transformed for business analysis and data interchange, using XML, web services and workflow to better fit with overall business integration strategies.
In this talk we describe the vision, the current status of our efforts, and some future challenges in building such a strategic information infrastructure.
Laura Haas is a Distinguished Engineer and the manager of Information Integration architecture in IBM's Software Group. Previously, Dr. Haas was a research staff member and manager at IBM's Almaden Research Center. She is best known for her work on the Starburst query processor (from which DB2 UDB was developed), and on Garlic, a system which allowed federation of heterogeneous data sources, and Clio, a schema mapping tool (both key technologies for Websphere Information Integrator). Dr. Haas is Vice President of the VLDB Board of Trustees. She has received several IBM awards for Outstanding Technical Achievement, and most recently, an IBM Corporate Award for her work on federated database technology.
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