Identification of Interface Information for a Virtual Data Integration

Nowadays, a production and logistics chain consists of many companies. The establishment of a robust information flow consists of the exchange of diverse information between the companies and its corresponding heterogenous IT-systems. By changing suppliers and logistic partners, the interfaces between their IT-systems have to be adapted. The adaption process is a complex and a time consuming process and it is a significant disturbance variable in the establishment of dynamic production and logistics chains. The time reduction to bind the relevant systems to one’s systems becomes more and more important. This gain of time benefits companies in relation of theirs competitors. But, the binding of heterogenous systems is not trivial. To bring data sources together, different data integration approaches have to be considered and challenging data integration problems have to be resolved. This includes e.g. the data sources have different meaning of the information, their structure and other context sensitive information. These facts leads to the important question: Which information about a data source is required and how it can be represented to enable an automated binding process of data sources. This paper explains why an exchange of interface information as a context information is important and how this exchange could look.