Enterprise Interoperability

Abstract

One of the trends in the global market is the increasing collaboration among enterprises. Constant changes in inter- and intra-organizational environments will persist in the future. Organizations have to flexibly and continuously react to (imminent) changes in markets and trading partners. Large companies but also SMEs have to cope with internal changes from both a technical (e.g., new information, communication, software and hardware technologies) and an organizational point of view (e.g., merging, re-organization, virtual organizations, etc.). In this context, the competitiveness of an enterprise depends not only on its internal performance to produce products and services, but also on its ability to seamlessly interoperate with other enterprises. External and internal collaborative work needs more interoperable solutions. The International Workshop on Enterprise Interoperability, IWEI, aims at identifying and discussing challenges and solutions with respect to enterprise interoperability, both at the business and the technical level. The workshop promotes the development of a scientific foundation for specifying, analyzing and validating interoperability solutions; an architectural framework for addressing interoperability problems from different viewpoints and at different levels of abstraction; a maturity model to evaluate and rank interoperability solutions with respect to distinguished quality criteria; and a working set of practical solutions and tools that can be applied to interoperability problems to date. IWEI is organized by the IFIP Working Group 5.8 on Enterprise Interoperability. The aim of IFIP WG5.8 is to advance and disseminate research and development results in the area of enterprise interoperability. The IWEI workshop therefore provides a platform where ideas that have emerged from IFIP WG5.8 meetings can be discussed, or reversely, where issues raised at the workshop can be taken to the IFIP community for further contemplation and investigation. This volume contains the proceedings of the second workshop, IWEI 2009, held October 13-14, 2009, in Valencia, Spain. Eleven papers were selected for oral presentation and publication, based on a thorough review process, in which each paper was reviewed by three experts in the field. The papers are representative of the current research activities in the area of enterprise interoperability. The papers cover a wide spectrum of Enterprise Interoperability issues, ranging from foundational theories, frameworks, architectures, methods and guidelines to European project results and case studies.