ABSTRACT
Information is the life-blood of any enterprise and without timely access to it the enterprise and its component parts cannot function effectively. In the majority of enterprises information is territorially held, so that different departments within an enterprise have severely constrained access and manipulation capabilities with respect to information belonging to other departments, here typical constraints are imposed by the use of non-standard formats and semantics. Hence a key issue
of the 1990’s has been the need to create enterprise wide information systems which are well structured and can be understood by all necessary parts of the enterprise. Also during the life of any company its information requirements change, hence it is vital that information systems used within the enterprise are capable of facilitating change. Bearing in mind these global requirements, researchers at MSI have identified a number of attributes that the next generation information architectures should possess, these include:
• Underlying model description of the information within the enterprise • Common interface to all information repositories • Object oriented view of information • Ability to handle heterogeneous information stores • Separation of user application requirements from knowledge of the structure
and location of information entities • Ability to modify the underlying information models
This paper will describe the major components of an information architecture conceived by MSI researchers which possess these attributes. Subsequently it details the use of the architecture in an industrial case study.
