Moving Active Functionality from Centralized to Open Distributed Heterogeneous Environments Mariano Cilia, Christof Bornhövd, and Alejandro P. Buchmann   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Middleware, Platforms, Architectures Abstract Active functionality is especially useful for enforcing business rules in applications, such as Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and e-commerce. It can be used as glue among existing applications, and for data transformations between heterogeneous applications. However, traditional active mechanisms have been designed for centralized systems and are monolithic, thus making it difficult to extend and adapt them to the requirements imposed by distributed, heterogeneous environments. To correct this we present a flexible, extensible, service-based architecture built on ontologies, services and events/notifications. The main contributions of this work are: i) the homogeneous use of ontologies for a semantically meaningful exchange and combination of events in open heterogeneous environments, and for the infrastructure itself; ii) a flexible architecture for the composition of autonomous, elementary services to provide Event-Condition-Action (ECA) functionality in different configurations; iii) the interaction of these services via notifications using a publish/subscribe mechanism (concept-based addressing). DiSC'02 © 2003 Association for Computing Machinery