BISGrid stands for B usiness I nformation S ystems in Grid and is a project spornsored by the German Federal Ministery of Education and Research in the context of the D-Grid initative . More information about the project can be found at the Project Homepage .
In order to map business processes to the technical system level the integration of heterogeneous information systems - referred to as Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) - is crucial. Thereby, integration is often achieved by service orchestration in service-oriented architectures (SOA). A means commonly used to create SOA are Web Services since they enable service orchestration and hide the underlying technical infrastructure. Modern Grid middlewares such as UNICORE 6 (http://www.unicore.eu) and Globus Toolkit 4 (http://www.globus.org/toolkit/) are based on the Web Service Resource Framework (WSRF), a standard that extends classical, stateless Web Services to be stateful. Such WSRF-based Web Services, also called Grid Services, provide a basis to build SOAs using Grid technologies. %Thus, EAI and Grid technologies have much in common since both technologies focus on integration problems within a heterogeneous environment, EAI on application level and Grid technologies on resource level.
In BIS-Grid we focus on realising EAI using Grid technologies. One major objective is to proof that Grid technologies are feasible for information systems integration. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) shall be enabled to integrate heterogeneous business information systems and to use external Grid resources and services with affordable effort. To do so, we develop a workflow engine, the BIS-Grid workflow engine , that is capable to integrate Grid Services. This engine is based upon service extensions to the UNICORE 6 Grid middleware, using an arbitrary WS-BPEL workflow engine and standard WS-BPEL to orchestrate Grid Services. Also, it propagates service orchestrations as Grid Services. The main reason that led us to the decision to use UNICORE 6 is that UNICORE 6 is a pioneer in adopting Grid standards, since the support of standards is essential for us, especially regarding security. The WS-BPEL workflow engine to be used is ActiveBPEL (http://www.activevos.com/community-open-source.php) since it exhaustively supports the WS-BPEL standard, and is well accepted in the business domain as well as in the Grid domain. We refrain from extending well-adopted standards and technologies as far as possible to increase sustainability. Instead, we use service extensions to UNICORE 6 to conceal the WS-BPEL engine by wrapping the message exchange between the engine and Grid Services.
