SOA information as a service pattern specifications

Guenter Sauter et al have three excellent SOA Information as a service pattern specification papers on data federation, data consolidation, and data cleansing. You can find these three papers on developerWorks:

• Data federation pattern: The data federation pattern virtualizes data from multiple disparate information sources. The pattern creates an integrated view into distributed information without creating data redundancy while federating both structured and unstructured information. This article describes the federation of structured information (data) with a focus on the SOA context. This pattern specification helps data and application architects make informed decisions on data architecture and document decision guidelines.
  


• Data consolidation pattern: The data consolidation pattern specification helps data and application architects make informed architectural decisions and improve decision guidelines. In this article you will see how you can apply the pattern in the SOA context. The primary business driver for the data consolidation pattern, also referred to as the data population pattern, is to gather and reconcile data from multiple data sources before this information is needed. To do so, it extracts data from one or more sources, transforms that data into the desired target format, and loads it into some persistent data target. The prepopulation of a persistent target is a key differentiator between this pattern and the data federation pattern.
  


• Data cleansing pattern: The data cleansing pattern specifies rules for data standardization, matching, and survivorship that enforce consistency and quality on the data it is applied against. The data cleansing pattern validates the data (whether persistent or transient) against the cleansing rules and then applies changes to enforce consistency and quality. In this article, you learn to apply the data cleansing pattern within a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) context. This pattern specification helps you, as a data or application architect, to make informed architectural decisions and to improve decision guidelines.