Enterprise Portability
Integration is one of the most costly and challenging tasks that enterprises face today. A typical enterprise has a multitude of legacy databases and corresponding applications. Semantic integration allows an enterprise to integrate any application with any data at any location - without incurring the costs associated with manually reconciling and validating inconsistent data exchanged between enterprise systems.
Leveraging semantic integration will result in improved data quality through centrally managed, locally deployed, reusable operations, plus reduced time and cost to integrate your applications. Contivo Vocabulary Management Solution enables enterprise applications to semantically integrate and aggregate multiple data values through one infrastructure.
One principal contributor to the cost of integration is the lack of consistent information architecture. Most integration projects simply use point-to-point mappings between the information available in the source system and the information needed in the target system.
Information architects use common information models (CIM) to gain control over these costs. Standards known as common object models (COM) or standardized business objects work by defining a shared, common description of information as a canonical message that is exchanged by applications in executing a business process. When a canonical is used instead of point-to-point integration, the number of links and associated costs are significantly reduced and adding a new system to the business activity requires only incremental cost and effort.
Bringing Canonicals to Life
Canonicals, COMs, CIMs, or Business Object Documents (BODs) are shaped representations of business information; they identify the set of data to be shared by applications. Canonicals can be created entirely within an organization, but most users prefer to start with an existing (at least partially standardized) canonical and the modify it to handle their particular application needs. A canonical should contain all of the information relevant to a specific business process.
Canonicals should reconcile data differences that exist because each disparate system and standard has its own, unique perspective of what information is important and how it should best be represented.
A canonical approach cannot meet these goals in and of itself. It needs to be supported by infrastructure, tools, and processes that make using them easy and natural. Contivo supports canonicals and provides a robust and centrally managed repository to retain and leverage knowledge.
Working with Canonicals – Contivo Brings Canonicals/COMs/CIMs to Life
Contact Us
If you have specific business integration needs that you would like to discuss, or if you would like to understand more about Liaison's data transformation solutions, contact us at services@liaison.com.