App Store

Connectors can use apps for various purposes. There are three types of data apps:

• Data apps developed in-house used by a data provider’s own connector (certification by the certification body is not required for these as a rule)
• Data apps of third-party providers obtained from the app store (possibly requiring certification)
• Data apps provided by the connector of the data user allowing the data provider to use certain functions before data are exchanged, for example filtering or summarizing data (possibly also requiring certification)

Data apps can also be divided into three categories:

• System adapters are data apps on the data provider side that establish interfaces to external company information systems. The principal task of a data app in this category is to enable access to company information systems and, when needed, to convert from an internal data model to a data model that is recommended or considered the standard for a certain application domain.
• Intelligent data apps (or data sink connectors) are data apps on the data consumer side that execute all types of data processing, transformation or storage functionality. Normally the data provided by a smart data app or sent to it already include metadata.
• Additional apps providing a certain use of the data on the side of the data user or data provider. Usage policies can force the processing of the data in a trusted environment, that is in a trusted connector.