Sovereign systems and dynamic federations

Modern information services require world-wide cooperation, and involve a group of autonomously administered computing systems, i.e., sovereign systems. Traditionally, system integration has been facilitated by forcing a common interface layer on each of the systems involved. However, autonomous administration causes asynchrony of service evolution and variation in common service behaviour in each system. In such an environment, a single middleware solution cannot be practically required to be the basis for globally integrated software systems. Instead, capabilities are required for dynamical establishment of federations across different middlewares, i.e., capabilities of negotiating on new cooperation relationships amongst independent systems. There is no call for new middleware solutions, but further exploitation of current middleware services could lead to added interoperability with less administrative effort. The essential feature for federation is systems’ mutual reflection. This requirement is not too hard to achieve at practical level in systems that are based on the current emerging frameworks, such as OMG/CORBA and TINA. This paper discusses binding processes within federated systems in order to show how various middleware services together build a mutual reflection mechanism.