IEIP: An Inter-Enterprise Integration Platform for e-Commerce Based on Web Service Mediation

Cross-platform interoperability of Web services makes it possible to wrap and combine information assets from heterogeneous systems to create a consolidated application. Here we propose a new pragmatic architectural model using Web services as building blocks, to form an inter-enterprise integration platform for e-commerce. The key idea is to separate the view of a Web service defined by its provider from the views of this Web service employed by consumers. Based on this principle, we explain the use of Web service mediators which act on behalf of both service providers and consumers. We advance the notion of requester-based views of a Web service, which are published by a mediator and used by service providers to construct services that suit the consumer. To complement those, we use customer-oriented global views which express the information need of a customer. IEIP architecture improves on traditional data and enterprise service integration systems. It achieves the following two goals: a customer can use its own (private) view to access a number of different Web services, as it is using a global view; and a provider can provide one view for a service implementation that can be accessed by different requesters using different global views. Leveraging this model, we report on a prototype supporting a European-wide parking services platform that integrates data and services from a large number of parking providers