Concepts

Abstract

The basic integration concepts required to define and execute integration between an arbitrary number of endpoints are discussed in this chapter. These integration concepts are independent of a particular implementation architecture or of particular implementation technologies. All approaches from academic research, standards organizations, industrial research and industrial products define and implement these concepts in one form or another implicitly or explicitly. Since B2B integration is not yet an established discipline (like relational database management systems), the terminology around the presented integration concepts varies significantly from case to case. Furthermore, different approaches propose alternative integration concepts that might look different albeit all address the same functionality. However, in general they can all be mapped to those presented in the following.