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Abstract
Two common problems, which face organizations today, are the lack of a generic application integration framework that encapsulates an organizations legacy appli-cations and the inability to access those same applications via the World Wide Web. Several application integration technologies exist today. To varying extents, frame-works built using each of these technologies can be web-enabled.|This thesis first examines the predominant component integration technologies available today and identifies the pros and cons of using each. It also brie y surveys generic integration framework design options. Finally, it focuses on the Web Services technologies of XML and SOAP as the recommended integration technologies. This thesis proposes that XML and SOAP be used to create a knowledge-based applica-tion integration framework, which uses wrappers or translators to abstract both the user interface and the legacy applications from the core knowledge engine giving the framework a large degree of extensibility and exibility.