Interaction Support System for Unlocking Computational and Informational Resources

Due to business innovation and IT, information systems (IS) are made up of distributed autonomous subsystems running on heterogeneous IT platforms. These subsystems implement differently same business objects and processes. Thus pieces of data and processes are overlapping and replicated. Moreover, informational and computational resources are locked i.e. they do exist, but they are not accessible. This paper specifies an interaction-dedicated subsystem of the IS called interaction support system (ISS). It is a support for interactions. It aims to: (1) provide subsystems of IS with a unified and consistent representation of business objects, (2) coordinate processes, and (3) lock data and processes. An implementation of a web-based business object-oriented ISS, a specialization of the ISS, is made up of four elements: 1) browser used by subsystems to browse and query business objects over the Internet/Intranet, 2) a web server on which run the logic of the ISS, 3) a metadata representing distribution of business objects and processes, and 4) business objects implementations over the subsystems willing to interact.