Inconsistency tolerance across enterprise solutions

As every information system becomes connected to every other information system, they form the so-called "information utility". This is the domain in which contemporary distributed systems have to operate. New applications have to be evolved on this platform of existing systems that may hold inconsistent information. Consequently, solutions need to be able work in a world of only partially correct information. In this paper, we discuss means whereby architects, designers and engineers may, in this context of information inconsistency, develop new business solutions and reason about their validity. In particular we describe the properties of inter-enterprise system architectures for applications working with partially replicated and partially consistent information. These must be able to operate under reversible assumptions and to undo operations as a consequence of reversing assumptions. We have developed exemplary architectures that exhibit these properties, used them to investigate the concept of inconsistency-tolerant components and begun to devise methods of building inter-enterprise applications from such components. This approach, we conjecture, makes reasoning about the validity of proposed inter-enterprise scale solutions more straightforward and thus increases the speed with which new solutions can be deployed. We are evaluating these ideas now, by building, along with our industrial collaborators, realistic enterprise-scale demonstrations in the domains of Finance and Defence.