Abstract
Due to the rapid development of information technology and the function-oriented enterprise organization architecture, there are usually many different kinds of information systems operating in the enterprise. Traditionally, these systems use middlewares as the communivation tools. Such methods only provide point-to-point solutions and their abitility to react to changes of information technology is very limited. Even some companies adopt large-scale software systems such as an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, there are still other considerations to prevent us from totally integrating all information systems in the enterprise. While the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced the release of the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 specification as a W3C recommendation in Feb 1998, the features of XML, such as extensibility, structural representation of data, and built for Internet and Web, have atteacted software vendors to incorporate this technology into their products. In this research, we proposed a solution using XML as the data middleware in the enterprise application integration architecture. First, we transform the E-R models in the enterprise databases into the XML DTD, which is used to verify the correctness of the interchange data, with appropriate contraints. Then we use XML documents to represent the concept of business process by using the Event-driven Process Chart (EPC) and the Unified Modeling Language (UML). Finally, we use an information system for the warehouse center to prove the workablility of the proposed methodology. Through the method described above, we introduce the XML technology into the enterprise information system, and to make data interchange more easily. Besides, it’s more convenient to delivery data between different development tools via the XML documents incorporating the concept of business process inside.