The "lambda" process

Before retrying to define what I mean by "Semantic Integration", I think I should before introduce what I called the "lambda" process. Before writing this post, I have made some research info my hard drive, and my oldest document I have found with the drawing below was from April 2002:

Figure 1: The "lambda" process

The idea expressed by this drawing is that no format specification should be exchanged between the teams of the respective applications/systems to integrate. For instance, if you have to integrate a SAP system delivering IDOC with an EDI server reading EDIFACT message, ideally, the SAP team should never see the format speification (MIG or Message Implementation Guidelines) of the EDIFACT, and the EDI team should never see the IDOC format specification!

The only document that can be directly shared, between the teams of the respective applications/systems to integrate, is the semantic specifcation capturing the meaning of the information (i.e. the semantic) to be exchnaged by the two applications/systems.

Once the shared semantic specification is finalised, each team of the respective applications/systems to integrate should give to (and only to) the Middleware Team, its application-specific format specification and the links between this format specification and the semantic specification.