Systems Interoperability Evaluation through Formalisation of Semantic Relationships

Abstract

To remain competitive, enterprises increasingly need to collaborate with each other and evolve into extended enterprises or networked enterprises. These organisation configurations incite the different enterprise systems to be interconnected in spite of their functional, structured, and conceptual heterogeneity. Typically, these features refer to the interoperability that can be defined as the capacity of systems or organisations to provide or to accept services and to use those services to effectively operate together (IEEE 1990). To promote added value creation through this collaborative activity, there is an increasing demand for information exchange and knowledge sharing among the various information systems (known as technical interoperability). Information and communications technologies and implementing standards can contribute to solving (at least partially) the barriers to technical interoperability. However, these efforts remain insufficient to guarantee interoperability at the conceptual level, where enterprises in a networked system can share information with each other, interpret this information correctly according to a common business semantics and then use this information to achieve a global mission.