FORWISS

BAVARIAN RESEARCH CENTER FOR KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEMS

A Marketplace for heterogeneous Components of Information Systems

Field of work:

Today, we find two trends in the field of commercial information systems: Programs get more and more modular, so we can talk about componentware. Middleware and enterprise application integration (EAI) as new kinds of software arise form the need of integration, that combine and adapt heterogeneous systems. If we combine this trends with the idea of software reuse and the repositories for software artefacts, we come to a scenario in which software vendors will offer functional limited software modules. Integrators will combine this modules to ERP systems. Focus of this project are tools, which could be used in a marketplace like that. One is a repository which contains components of different vendors. It is important, that the description of components is uniform, unique and understandable for vendors, integrators and customers, especially concerning the functionality of components. Other tools could be used for invitations for tenders, searching for market niches, requirements analysis or configuration management. This project was formerly part of the KEBBA initiative (types of integrated application packages between individual and standardized software, especially application systems for industries and types of enterprises) that was supported by BMBF (German Federal Ministry of Education and Research) until 1998.