Enterprise Interoperability Research Articles

Economic Information Systems Interoperability

In this article we define and describe the economic information interoperability problem and how it affects today's enterprises in the context of globalization and current ICT development, the currently used solutions found in the integration and interoperability of information systems literature (EDI, Web Services, ebXML, RosettaNet, XBRL), the main research activities done so far in the field of Enterprise Interoperability and the observed trends in the evolution of standard solutions.

Research on Enterprise Application Integration Based on Service Oriented and Workflow

Aiming at the disadvantages like the enterprise application system scalability, integration and interoperability is not strong, neglecting the business process integration, the integration platform lacks flexibility and adaptability, based on service oriented and workflow technology system, Service-oriented and for integration of foundation, enterprise application integration system solutions were proposed. To realize loosely coupled, business process integration, high integration and interoperability strong application integration system we need discuss enterprise application integration the architecture and hierarchical model.

Interoperability Evaluation of Iranian Organizations through Proposed National E-government Interoperability Framework (Case Study of Tehran Municipality)

Interoperability is a property for connecting systems, information and work methods both inside and outside enterprises in national, regional and local levels. Interoperable enterprises can offer services with better quality and lower prices. In order to obtain interoperability in enterprises, it is necessary to use specific frameworks or models. The purpose of this article is providing an interoperability framework for enterprises through studying different interoperability frameworks and using countries' experiences. The proposed framework has different interoperability dimensions such as business, information, semantic and technical including different components. The framework is evaluated by expert’s opinions. Finally, the level of interoperability in Tehran municipality organizations is assessed with using the proposed framework.

A Practical Method of Reducing the Gaps in e-Government Interoperability Implementation: Case of Patient Referral Information Exchange

In recent years, e-government interoperability frameworks (e-GIFs) and enterprise architectures (EAs) have been extensively developed as mechanism tools for achieving the interoperability. However, several researches indicate that only adopting both e-GIFs and EAs may not be inadequate. There have been numerous obstacles and barriers such as bureaucracy, compliances, capacity and enforcement that can produce the gaps in progress towards realizing the achievements of eGovernment interoperability. This paper defines two main existing gaps arisen between concepts and practices as well as among three dimensions (organizational, semantic and technical) of interoperability. The paper proposes a pragmatic approach to bridging them by adopting repository services, support tools and collaborative activities. The paper also illustrates an approach architecture, design methodology and system design based on UN/CEFACT standards. At last, it significantly describes how the approach can reduce the gaps with the application of patient referral information exchanges.

Technical, semantic and organizational issues of enterprise interoperability and networking

Enterprise networking refers to any kind of organization structures in which two or more geographically dispersed business entities need to work in interaction. This can happen within a single distributed enterprise (networked enterprise) or among several enterprises (network of enterprises), including the extended enterprise or virtual organizations. This concerns any kind of organizations, e.g. industrial firms, public organizations or large government agencies. Enterprise interoperability is a sine qua non-condition for enterprise integration and networking. It largely relies on information and communication technologies (ICT), especially Internet computing. The paper uses the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) as a foundational baseline to first discuss technical, semantic and organizational aspects of enterprise interoperability and networking and finally to address some open research issues.

Enterprise interoperability resource selection based on parallel genetic algorithm

Enterprise interoperability resource selection based on parallel genetic algorithm

Assessment of advanced cryptographic antiviral techniques

The engineering world appears today more mature than ever in providing stable technology premises in order to build large scale, real interoperable and secure enterprise information systems, and strengthening the fundamental structure of private and public organisations. However, as technology has evolved, more opportunities have become available for virus writers to express their imagination in malicious code. Computer viruses are a major problem in modern day computing, threatening the structure of organisations, their enterprise systems and eliminating user-acceptance of electronic and mobile services provided. Detection tools such as virus scanners have performed poorly, particularly when facing previously unknown virus or novel variants of existing ones. This paper proposes and performs assessment on advanced proactive and reactive cryptographic measures that ensure the robustness and security of enterprises and computer systems.

Service-oriented enterprise interoperability in automobile supply chain management

How to enhance interoperability between stakeholders and improve efficiency of supply chain management is the key issue that needs to be addressed in automobile industry. Existing interoperability solutions are suitable only for large enterprises, however, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) lack cheap, easy to integrate and easy to customize solutions. This paper proposes a methodology that provides a guide on how to establish interoperability between enterprises through a federated approach. An interoperability service platform is designed and delivered in the form of Software as a Service (SaaS). This paper introduces the specifications of the service platform and proposes an interactive framework which is used to establish interoperability between the service platform and other on-premise applications.

Knowledge-based system for collaborative process specification

This paper presents an ontology-based approach for the design of a collaborative business process model (CBP). This CBP is considered as a specification of needs in order to build a collaboration information system (CIS) for a network of organizations. The study is a part of a model-driven engineering approach of the CIS in a specific enterprise interoperability framework that will be summarised. An adaptation of the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) is used to represent the CBP model. We develop a knowledge-based system (KbS) which is composed of three main parts: knowledge gathering, knowledge representation and reasoning, and collaborative business process modelling. The first part starts from a high abstraction level where knowledge from business partners is captured. A collaboration ontology is defined in order to provide a structure to store and use the knowledge captured. In parallel, we try to reuse generic existing knowledge about business processes from the MIT Process Handbook repository. This results in a collaboration process ontology that is also described. A set of rules is defined in order to extract knowledge about fragments of the CBP model from the two previous ontologies. These fragments are finally assembled in the third part of the KbS. A prototype of the KbS has been developed in order to implement and support this approach. The prototype is a computer-aided design tool of the CBP. In this paper, we will present the theoretical aspects of each part of this KbS as well as the tools that we developed and used in order to support its functionalities.

Towards a systemic formalisation of interoperability

Interoperability has been mainly approached from an IT point of view or enterprise collaboration perspective. This paper aims at contributing to develop a science base for interoperability by studying interoperability on the basis of the system theory. The main contribution is to propose a formalisation of interoperability grounded in the general system theory: the Ontology of Interoperability (OoI). OoI provides a meta-model for ontological descriptions of systems, problems and solutions, which can then be inferred for a computer-aided interoperability diagnosis and problem solving. Related concepts definitions as well as a systemic model and a decisional model are given and discussed. Based on the Framework for Enterprise Interoperability (CEN/ISO 11354), the specialisation of the OoI to the enterprise domain is discussed. A case example is presented to illustrate the proposed approach.

Knowledge framework for intelligent manufacturing systems

Nowadays, competition is experienced not only among companies but among global supply chains and business networks. There is a demand for intelligent world-class solutions capable of reinforcing partnerships and collaborations with an improved cross-cultural understanding. However due to the proliferation of terminology, organizations from similar business environments have trouble cooperating, and are experiencing difficulties exchanging electronically vital information, such as product and manufacturing data, even when using international standards. To address similar interoperability problems, the Intelligent manufacturing systems program ( http://www.ims.org/content/glossary ) is providing an opportunity to develop industry-led R&D initiatives, building common semantics and integrated solutions. The SMART-fm project was one of those initiatives. It led to the development of the international standard for product data representation and exchange in the furniture sector (ISO 10303-236) and identified the challenge of semantic interoperability which is today a major challenge in modern enterprise integration. This paper presents a knowledge framework to address that challenge and make interoperable intelligent manufacturing systems a reality. It proposes to use semantically enriched international product data standards, and knowledge representation elements as a basis for achieving seamless enterprise interoperability.

Report on the IFIP WG5.8 international workshop on enterprise interoperability (IWEI 2008)

Enterprise interoperability is a growing research topic, rooted in various sub-disciplines from computer science and business management. Enterprise interoperability addresses intra- and inter-organizational collaboration and is characterized by the objective of aligning business level and technology level solutions and reconciling viewpoints of the different stakeholders. Enterprise interoperability comprises issues which are not yet well-understood and an overall framework for dealing with these issues is still lacking. On the other hand, enterprise interoperability is an essential property of organizations to have successful business operations in the globalized market. We believe that the IWEI workshop provides a useful forum for researchers and practitioners to discuss enterprise interoperability solutions and challenges, and, in collaboration with IFIP WG5.8, to address the identified challenges in future work. This article provides a report on the results of the first IWEI workshop (IWEI 2008).

Enterprise Interoperability Short-Lived Ontology for HLA Compliant Federated Enterprise Interoperability Approach

This paper aims at proposing an implementation of the concept of federation oriented enterprise interoperability. We give first, a review of ongoing researches on enterprise interoperability and the HLA standard that seems to be an accurate solution to support execution of this concept. Indeed, the HLA standard, initially designed for military M&S purpose, can be transposed for enterprise interoperability at the implementation level, reusing the years of experiences in distributed systems. From that postulate, we propose the first framework to implement distributed enterprises models from federated enterprise interoperability approach conceptual level.

Modelling Interoperability in Networked Organisations with the Connector Concept

Enterprise interoperability has been a research subject more than 2 decades and still offers numerous challenges for the scientific community. Based on an industrial case from automotive supplier industry and earlier work on variability modelling, this paper proposes to address enterprise interoperability by identifying correspondences and developing stepwise adjustment of enterprise models. The approach presented, called Connector Concept, puts equal focus on process and product knowledge when specifying interoperability requirements and has the long-term ambition to generate interfaces between IT-systems based on model integration. The main contributions of the work are (1) an initial method for connecting enterprise models of collaborating enterprises, (2) use of feature modelling for identification of interoperability requirements in product knowledge, and (3) an industrial case showing a concrete example and offering first experiences with the above approaches.

Technical, Semantic and Organizational Issues of Enterprise Interoperability and Networking

Enterprise Networking refers to any kind of organization structures in which two or more geographically dispersed business entities need to work in interaction. This can happen within a single distributed enterprise (networked enterprise) or among several enterprises (network of enterprises), including the extended enterprise or virtual organizations. This concerns any kind of organizations, e.g. industrial firms, public organizations or large government agencies. Enterprise interoperability is a sine qua non condition for enterprise integration and networking. It largely relies on information and communication technologies (ICT), especially Internet computing. The paper uses the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) as a foundational baseline to first discuss technical, semantic and organizational aspects of enterprise interoperability and networking and finally to address some open research issues.

Semantic Enrichment of Standard-based Electronic Catalogues

Today, enterprises are facing serious interoperability problems concerning the exchange of electronic data. Due to the proliferation of terminology, organizations from similar business environments have trouble cooperating, and supply chains are experiencing difficulties exchanging electronically vital information, such as catalogue data. In order to solve this problem, standardization communities are working to define formalized structures for catalogue and product data. However, standards by themselves do not solve semantic interoperability issues. For instance, a group of enterprises which share catalogue information in their business activities need to have a common semantics to understand each other. Otherwise their systems might understand the data structure but not its meaning. This is today a major challenge in modern enterprise integration. This paper contributes to achieving seamless product oriented enterprise interoperability by proposing a framework based on knowledge representation elements to support the semantic enrichment of standard-based electronic catalogues.

Model Driven Interoperability through Semantic Annotations using SoaML and ODM

Abstract Enterprise Interoperability is increasingly being enabled by use of service oriented architectures for the IT systems involved. A combined use of enterprise models, ontologies and service models can facilitate better semantic interoperability of the services being provided and requested. The focus of this paper is to show that service interoperability can be supported through a model driven approach with service oriented systems being described with service models (in SoaML) with semantic annotations to and from ontology models (in ODM)

Architectures for enterprise integration and interoperability: Past, present and future

The paper defines and clarifies basic concepts of enterprise architectures. Then an overview on architectures for enterprise integration developed since the middle of the 1980s is presented. The main part of the paper focuses on the recent developments on architectures for enterprise interoperability. The main initiatives and existing works are presented. Future trends and some research issues are discussed and conclusions are given at the end of the paper.

Semantic enrichment of enterprise modelling supported by ontologies

Enterprise modelling and ontology are two separated fields of research. On the one hand, there exists various enterprise modelling languages developed since twenty years, that are mostly considered on a syntactic basis. On the other hand, ontologies have been elaborated, which aim to formally define concepts within a specific domain in order to avoid ambiguities of understanding. Some problems of application and use of enterprise modelling languages raised come from the lack of semantic. So, semantic enrichment of these languages is becoming an important topic in enterprise integration and interoperability areas and ontology can be a solution to bring semantics.

Methodology for Enterprise Interoperability

This paper aims at presenting a methodology for guiding enterprises to improve interoperability. This methodology consists in (i) a framework of interoperability, which structures specific solutions of interoperability and is composed of barriers, concerns and approaches dimensions; (ii) method to measure interoperability, which takes into consideration interoperability (maturity) before and (operational performances) during a partnership; and (iii) a structured approach defining the steps of the methodology, from the expression of enterprise's needs to implementation of solutions. The relationship which consistently relates these components is highlighted. It enables establishing interoperability in a step-by-step manner. This paper presents each component of the methodology and shows how it operates.