Enabling business cooperation using a publish-subscribe architecture aware of transactions

The paper describes a publish-subscribe architecture enabling the cooperation of heterogeneous and distributed information systems with no need for defining cooperation policies at the system design time. To this end, we propose an abstraction called observation interface, which allows a system to notify to registered observers system-related events. The main goal of this architecture is to ensure the transaction-consistent observation of single information systems. Several cooperation activities between systems with observation interfaces can be obtained by adding external activities. This can be dynamically done by adding observer agents during the system life cycle rather than at system design time. This approach can also be applied to legacy systems featuring basic notification mechanisms.