Exploring alternatives for representing and accessing design knowledge about enterprise integration

Enterprise integration refers to solutions that facilitate meaningful interactions among heterogeneous legacy applications. The scale, complexity and specificity of most enterprise integration efforts mean that design knowledge for enterprise integration has resisted codification. Important exceptions to this include: use of Business Process Models (BPM) to understand integration requirements; and Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP), which present designers with abstract descriptions of recurring design tactics for integrating applications. The two, however, can be at odds. BPM encourages the control flow perspective; whereas EIP codifies an operational perspective. Mapping between the two to develop coherent solutions, therefore, tends to be problematic. To bridge the gap, we suggest an approach that builds on the theory of speech acts. We develop essential components of such an approach, including a re-representation of EIP as structures of speech acts, a characterization of tasks in BPM with action types, and a mapping between speech acts and action types. These components are accompanied by inference rules that produce a mapping between sets of tasks in a business process and structures of speech acts to allow reasoning on identification of appropriate EIPs for given set of tasks. We demonstrate usefulness of the proposed approach by application to industry cases.