Constructing Federated Enterprise Schemas with Conceptualized Legacy Data Systems

In this paper, we present an integral approach for blending modern business data requirements with existing legacy data resources that offers techniques at both the conceptual and the implementation level. Therefore, we depend on access/integration reverse engineering technologies, including wrappers. The reverse engineering strategy allows modernized business data systems to co-exists with conceptualized legacy data systems. In particular, the methodology aims at constructing a conceptual Federated Enterprise Schema (FES) for supporting the complicated task of data wrapper integration throughout the development cycle: from specification down to the actual implementation. The FES model plays a pivot role in the creation of the virtual alliances by representing a unified data view for all participants. Hence, it serves as the foundation for the actual integration of the wrapped legacy data systems, possibly with modernized data systems. Thus, in contrast to other available approaches, the FES is not developed from scratch, but instead, composed out of pre-existing legacy wrappers. This methodology is supported by an integrated toolset that incorporates the DB-MAIN case tool for assisting modeling activities and wrapper building, and supplementary software components for assisting the designer while identifying reusable artifacts and retrofitting them into the federation.