Cooperation of heterogeneous legacy information systems: a methodological framework

In many enterprises the presence of heterogenous legacy information systems is pervasive, nevertheless the different component organizations need to cooperate in order to offer new services. The Distributed Object Computing is a valid approach for the definition of a cooperative model among heterogeneous legacy information systems, but few methodologies and architectures explicitly address these issues. This paper describes a case study (or better, a set of case studies) in which these issues were addressed: it is the Cooperative Architecture over the Unitary Network of the Italian Public Administration. Then it proposes some methodological suggestions, stemming from the case studies, for the development of cooperative systems based on distributed object middleware.