Object-oriented re-engineering of information systems in a heterogeneous distributed environment

Distributed object-oriented environments are the architecture of choice for supporting modern, highly flexible business processes. Existing host-based information systems (IS) must be integrated into these environments in order to preserve their investments in a changing environment. In this paper we present a strategy that establishes a cooperative co-existence of legacy and new IS in a distributed object-oriented environment. The cooperation is based on the approximation of the semantics of the participating systems. The approximated semantics allows for a mapping between corresponding entities of the different models. This mapping forms the basis of an implementation translating and replicating the repository instances of the systems taking part in the cooperation.