Resumen
Traditional data integration approaches, such as data warehousing, are costly to deploy and do not easily support either real-time access to data or dealing with autonomous sources. An alternative architecture for data integration in the financial sector is outlined. The architecture is based on 2 emerging paradigms: Web services and Enterprise Information Integration (EII). The physical layer of the architecture is comprised of wrappers that make sources conform to a common model. The integration layer allows creating unified virtual views over data from the sources and executing queries written in a database-like language. When compared to traditional data integration approaches, such as data warehousing, the proposed architecture has a number of advantages, including the following: 1. It allows real-time data integration, 2. EII solutions are less expensive and faster to deploy, 3. Autonomous sources can be effectively dealt with, and 4. The information contained in external Web sites can be used as if it was stored in a local database.