Four-Schema concept consist of

a physical schema,
a logical schema,
a data view schema, and
a business schema.

 

The use of the four schema concept is greatly taken advantaged of the in the implementation of a service oriented business processes integration.  It helps to resolve problems with 3-schema concept.

 

 

Today, there is a very widely recognized trend in the marketing and business environment and this trend is the pushing towards a scenario wherein companies and business enterprises are networked together in order to be able gain higher profit from the collaborative efforts, and improve operational flexibility while reducing the operational cost.

 

This trend the transformation of the current business environment requires companies to adopt more collaborative working practices which are based on the integration of businesses processes within a wide area of business players such as the business partners, suppliers, vendors, and public bodies.

 

In order for integration to take place, the underlying architecture must have to be resolved first so that smooth and near seamless integration can happen. 

 

One of the most important aspects of not just in enterprise data integration but in computer science in general is the data modeling. 

 

This is the process of creating a data model with the use of the model theory (the formal description of data) so that a data model instance can be created. The physical schema, a logical schema, a data view schema, and a business schema. 

 

A typical data model may have an instance of one of the three. The conceptual or business schema is used for describing an the semantics pertaining to the business organizations. It is in this schema that the entity classes which represent things of significance to the organization and the entity relationships which are the assertions about associations between pairs of entity classes are being defined. 

 

In the logical schema, the descriptions of the semantics are being contained here. The semantics’ descriptions may be represented by a particular data manipulation technology including the descriptions of tables and columns, object oriented classes, and XML tags, among other things. 

 

The physical schema is where the descriptions of the physical means by which data are stored and other concerns pertaining to partitions, CPUs, tablespaces, etc.  

 

The addition of the data view schema is what makes the four schema concept complete and distinct. The data view schema details how enterprises can offer the information that they wish to share with others as well as request what they want.

 

In real life business data management implementation, there really are many types of data model being developed using many different notations and methods. 

 

Some of the data models are biased towards physical implementation while other are biased toward understanding business data, and a still a few are biased towards business managers. 

 

The four schema concept, as mentioned, is biased towards service oriented business processes integration.

 

The typical overall information architecture of on-demand enterprise collaboration or service oriented business processes integration implementation involves on-demand information exchange which is covered under the four schema concept.

 

Some good practices in this area tend to rely on homogeneous semantics which can pose difficulty in achieving for independent databases owned by independent enterprises. 

 

The problem on difficulty can be overcome by developing a new information exchange model to extend previous global query results and cover independent databases.  

 

The new model provides a four-schema architecture which can already allow management for information sharing. 

 

Information matching is also to be considered and this can be done by employing approaches for query database and export database design.

 

 

Service oriented business processes integration is fast become a standard in enterprise management and many new schemas are expected to come into development.