How to optimally integrate
Web Services into your
enterprise
Lars Bauerle, Director, Product Management, Spotfire Inc.
Doug Del Prete, Senior IT Architect, IBM Healthcare and
LifeSciences
Agenda
• Overview of Spotfire and IBM
• Data Integration/Visualization Challenge – Focus
on Web Services
• DecisionSite/DiscoveryLink Architecture
• Live Walkthrough/Demo (Web Services)
• Other means of integrating web services in
DecisionSite
• Summary
• Breakfast Session hosted by IBM and Spotfire:
• Open Session – How are you using or planning to use
web services/SOA in your enterprise?
IBM HealthCare & Life Sciences
• Dedicated Life Sciences World Wide Business Unit
• Significant investments in research & solutions with business partners
• IBM Life Sciences Solutions
• IBM, with its global network of Business Partners, brings together
applications, infrastructure and services to create both enterprise and
point solutions to help Life Sciences and Healthcare customers reach
their specific goals.
• IBM Life Sciences has a strong Solution focus in several
overlapping areas with Spotfire:
Tools
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Drug Discovery
Drug Development, Manufacturing
Diagnostics, Medical Devices
Pharmaceutical Sales & Marketing
Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing
Applications
Partners
IBM
Life Sciences
Integration Platform
Infrastructure
Hardware
S
E
R
V
I
C
E
S
Spotfire + IBM Partnership
• Enterprise Expansion
• Scalability, WW Support, broad infrastructure offerings & Services
• Full solution approach
• Server Hardware: UNIX, Windows and Linux Servers
• pSeries (UNIX), xSeries (Windows) , and either one for Linux (simultaneously)
• Software: IBM Middleware
• WebSphere App Server (DecisionSite support enables leveraging the WebSphere family)
• DB2 Information Integrator® for Life Sciences (DiscoveryLink)
• Services
• Spotfire services + IBM Business Consulting, Infrastructure Integration & LS Solutions)
• End User Workstations & Monitors – for graphics intensive applications
• Can include financing, hosting… to make adoption easy
• Joint relationship benefits for infrastructure delivery
• Product testing, sizing tests, technology coordination, customer support
Data Integration Challenge
• In Life Sciences, and most industries, data and
information are distributed across many sites, functions
and data source types
• The challenge is to enable the enterprise to be able to
quickly adapt to an ever-changing business environment
and its underlying information flows
• Most companies have adopted one or more relational
database management systems for their mission-critical
applications, along with an ecosystem of related tools and
3rd party solutions
Data Integration Challenge
• Many tools are out there to help bridge the data
divides between selected different databases,
data sources and applications
• But IBM DiscoveryLink is the optimum
middleware-based solution to this data
integration challenge, across a very wide variety
of data sources
What is DiscoveryLink?
• DiscoveryLink® (DL) is a powerful technology available
from IBM that will allow you to view many data sources as
one heterogeneous “virtual relational database”
• Provides a “Federated Metadata” view of all enterprise data,
regardless of its location and type
• All data sources essentially become “SQL aware”, under
a cost-based optimizer that works with both relational and
non-relational data sources and their associated
“federated” queries
• Makes it easy to access these data sources and integrate all of
this data in a standardized way
• Based on the latest DB2 Information Integrator
middleware technology (a major IBM software initiative for
data integration)
Di s c o v e r y L i n k : A Ro b u s t So l u t i o n
Benefits
• Access to multiple, heterogeneous sources
• Complex queries across distributed data sources
• Leverage existing IT infrastructure and use specialized
functions of existing databases
• Integrating analysis tools and business intelligence
• Can put a SQL front-end and user security on data sources
such as BLAST, Pubmed, Genbank, XML, Web Services
• Can use for fast and easy ad-hoc extensions to a data
warehouse/mart
• Performance: Optimized queries cross-joined across all
data sources, also data caching
DecisionSite and DiscoveryLink
• But like many middleware enablement tools,
DiscoveryLink is not an end-user facility in and of
itself
• These two products together provide a robust,
flexible “best of breed” approach to analyzing
data:
• DecisionSite (DS) as the user interface/front-end to DL
middleware – makes row/column data “come alive”
with a rich set of visualizations and algorithms
• DiscoveryLink as a data source access engine for DS
– more data sources, faster
Enabling Guided Analytic Applications
Decision
Management
Dynamic End
User Experience
Role-configured
Guides and Tools
Research
Development
Manufacturing
Finance
Business
Processes
Information
Library
Information Link
Information Link
Information Link
Information Link
Intranet,
Extranet, Internet
Data Sources
DB2 II/ DiscoveryLink
Data mart
Virtual D
Operational
database
Web
Services
Operational
database
Non
Relational
Data
warehouse
Operational
database
Non
Relational
Data
Data Integration
Integration Challenge
Challenge – Focus
Focus on Web Services
Services
• Web Services – Defined
A Web service is a software system identified by a URI, whose public interfaces and
bindings are defined and described using XML. Its definition can be discovered by
other software systems. These systems may then interact with the Web service in a
manner prescribed by its definition, using XML based messages conveyed by Internet
protocols.
Source -- World Wide Web Consortium
• Web Services – Translated
• Enables an organization to access and link its applications with
the outside world via the Internet, in a secure environment
• Also enables an organization to link their own applications within
the enterprise -- even those coded in different programming
languages -- to reduce redundancy and increase efficiency
• Web Services is the key technology behind the new SOA (Service
Oriented Architecture) model that is increasingly being adopted by
corporations and organizations worldwide
Data
Data Integration
Integration Challenge
Challenge – Focus
Focus on Web Services
Services
• Web Services underlying technologies
and methods:
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XML
SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) -- for the input and output
messages, usually XML-based (but not necessarily)
HTTP -- the standard transport to carry these messages
WSDL (Web Services Description Language) – a special type of
XML that describes the web service “package”, i.e. its operations,
inputs and outputs
Languages – Java, PERL, C#/.NET (language independent)
• Up until now, using Web Services has
required custom programming
• Meaning it is often time-consuming and resource-intensive to
integrate web services into enterprise applications
Data
Data Integration
Integration Challenge
Challenge – Focus
Focus on Web Services
Services
• But this has all changed with the advent of the latest
release of DB2 Information Integrator 8.2 (also known by
the pre-release name “Masala”)!
• Together, DecisionSite and DiscoveryLink can access this
information over the internet and do a series of powerful
visualizations in a matter of minutes
•
•
No special skillsets or programming involved
Secure (user-authenticated) web services are supported (but not
needed by this particular web service)
• Local data caching of web-based data is provided by DL via
“Materialized Query Tables” (MQT’s), speeding up data access by
several orders of magnitude
Data
Data Integration
Integration Challenge
Challenge – Focus
Focus on Web Services
Services
• For example, take a simple web service like
“World Population” that is available as a public
“widget” on www.xmethods.com
• One operation obtains the list of countries
• Another operation returns population-based
information about a given country (this operation would
have to be run 227 times to get the population of all
countries in the world)
• Suppose we wanted to visualize/analyze
countries and populations, and integrate this with
an existing spreadsheet of countries and regions
Walkthrough
Live Walkthrough of using DiscoveryLink and
DecisionSite to visualize World Population
(using a Web Service)
Enabling Guided Analytic Applications
Decision
Management
Dynamic End
User Experience
Information
Library
Information Link
Information Link
Information Link
Information Link
DecisionSite Abstract Data Model (IM)
Intranet,
Extranet, Internet
Data Sources
DB2 II/ DiscoveryLink
Data mart
Virtual D
Operational
database
Web
Services
Operational
database
Non
Relational
Data
warehouse
Operational
database
Non
Relational
Walkthrough
Walkthrough Summary
• In the past few minutes you have seen:
• Configuring a web-based data source initially as a
Federated Physical Data Model in DiscoveryLink –
provide a WSDL and DiscoveryLink does the rest
• Configuring that data source in Spotfire DecisionSite
as a Federated Abstract Data Model, using the above
objects configured in DiscoveryLink
• Using that Abstract Data Model, build an Information
Link (query), run it and explore your data
• After this Information Link is available, it can be made
into a Guided Analytic “application” or distributed to a
larger team via DecisionSite “Posters” (not shown in
this walkthrough)
Walkthrough
Walkthrough Summary
• You have just seen how fast and easy it is to
configure a web services-based data source and
get a powerful set of visualizations from it
• “World Population” is just a simple example of
this – there are many more web services
increasingly being adopted in many industries
Integrating Web Services in DecisionSite
• DiscoveryLink is optimal for integrating web
services providing data into DecisionSite
• DecisionSite can also integrate Web services that
• Perform calculations
• Perform actions in other systems without returning any
data
• Create DecisionSite Tools that call web services
with data from DecisionSite and append/replace
returning data
Integrating Web Services in DecisionSite
• Build a tool that
generates the
appropriate
Web Services
call
• Use data
access APIs in
the import agent
Custom Component Library
DecisionSite Client
Posters
Visualizations
Filtering
Calculations
DecisionSite Analytics Server
Application Services
Applications
Library
Guides
(Posters, Guides,
Analysis)
Tools
Computation Services
R & S-PLUS Connectors
Information Services
Information Links
Information Model
Security & Administration
API
Summary
Summary
• Your applications and end users can now have
faster access to web services-based data
• DiscoveryLink enables the access
• DecisionSite makes the data “come alive”
• This is also true for Web Services that are
implemented on your corporate intranet, portal or
other internal infrastructure
• DecisionSite in general is very extensible to
include web services as well (i.e. especially those
that are algorithmic or perform other functions)
Additional
Additional Web
Web Services – Life Sciences
Sciences
• For data access, in Life Sciences there are
several web services already available, with
many more in development, including:
• caBIO (cancer Bioinformatics Infrastructure Objects)
from NCI
• DDBJ (DNA Data Bank of Japan)
• EMBL Nucleotide (European Molecular Biology
Laboratory)
• KEGG (Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes)
• NCBI Entrez Web Services
Additional Web Services – General
• Other cross-industry examples include:
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Mortgage Indexes
Shipment Tracking (UPS, FedEx, etc.)
Worldwide Stock Quotes
Worldwide Commodity Prices
Currency Exchange Rates and History
All Building Permits in the US
USDA Nutrient Data
“Do Not Call” list management
Send SMS/Pager messages worldwide
And many more!
References
• For more information:
• To learn more about IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences and IBM
Business Partners:
• visit http://www-1.ibm.com/industries/healthcare/
• or contact an IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences specialist at
[email protected].
• To learn more about Spotfire – www.spotfire.com
• Or contact John Babers at 617 702 1715
• IBM Spotfire Brief (PDF download)
• http://www1.ibm.com/industries/healthcare/doc/content/bin/Spotfire_3_30
.pdf
• IBM.com Life Sciences direct links
• DiscoveryLink
• http://www1.ibm.com/industries/healthcare/doc/content/bin/DiscoveryLink
_12_18_LORES_1.pdf