Business objects and application integration

Summary form only given as follows. Application integration addresses the need for diverse applications to be able to communicate with each other across application boundaries and across platform boundaries. Business objects extend the type system of relational databases to deal with the needs of application integration. The requirements of business application integration include event-based information workflow to manage the exchange of data, well-formed business objects to reduce the number of application interfaces and to keep the semantic integrity of the information exchange intact, seamless transformation to integrate the validation and construction of interfacing business objects, and heterogeneous transport adapters to move business objects from one place to another. The objective of this paper is to examine the requirements for business objects and their role in application integration and to show examples of how the Mercator product addresses these requirements