Data Integration Models and Architectures for Service Alliances

In recent years, providers offering similar services have increasingly formed alliances to increase their opportunities for matching customers. Moreover, it is no longer uncommon for one provider to participate in multiple alliances. It is important that providers participating in such multiple alliances integrate their data automatically, easily, and flexibly. Several view-based data integration architectures have been proposed, but they nevertheless present difficulties for multiple service alliances. Actually, two novel view-based data integration architectures have been developed in recent years to tackle these issues. They are the Dejima architecture and the BCDS architecture. No work of the relevant literature has discussed whether these architectures meet the requirements of multiple service alliances. The analyses presented herein clarify this point. First, three models of multiple service alliances using views are presented. Then these architectures are assessed for their capability of resolving the issues presented above. Finally, models implementing these architectures are summarized.