Information Organizer: A Comprehensive View on Reuse

Within one organization, there are often many conceptually related but technically separated information systems. Many of these are legacy systems representing enormous developmp-c m,ent efforts, and containing large amounts of data. The integration of these often requires extensive design modifications. Reusing applications "as is" with all the knowledge and data they represent would be a much more practical solution. This paper describes the Business Object Model, a model providing integration and reuse of existing applications and cross applications modelling capabilities and a Business Object Framework implementing the object model. We also present a product supporting the model and the framework, Information Organizer, and a number of design patterns that have been built on top of it to further decrease the amount of work needed to integrate legacy systems. We describe one such pattern in detail, a general mechanism for reusing relational databases.