A Study of EILS: Providing Semantic Interoperability through Ontology Hierarchy in EIS Integration

Abstract

Enterprise information systems (EIS) often face difficulties in linking various components and external systems. Interoperability is necessary when integrating EIS, with enterprises-partners according to existing EIS. However, interoperability among collaborating participants is hard to tackle in the interaction between business and IT problem domains during EIS integration process. The integration of EIS needs to be considered from an architectural point of view on issues around business, organization and information technology. Enterprise Isomorphic Architecture (EIA) was built as an effective architectural solution to coordinate powerful technologies with business applications to enable seamless inter- organizational integration. As the core part of EIA, Enterprise Isomorphic Layer Structure (EILS) studied in this paper is to provide structural and semantic identification of integrating EIS entities based on the ontology hierarchy for interoperability in problem domain. EILS allows reaching desired interoperability level of existing EIS by realizing business agility and IT infrastructure, consolidating processes between them, and facilitating business changes with simultaneous evolution of the IT infrastructure. Application of interoperable EIS based on EILS will give valuable positive practical effect in EIS integration.