Authors:
Aggelos Liapis
;
Stijn Christiaens
;
Pieter De Leenheer
and
Robert Meersman
Affiliation:
Semantics Technology & Applications Research Lab (STARLab), Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
Keyword(s):
CSCW, collaborative environments, ontology, enterprise interoperability, legacy systems.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
B2B, B2C and C2C
;
B2C/B2B Considerations
;
Business and Social Applications
;
Cloud Computing
;
Communication and Software Technologies and Architectures
;
e-Business
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
e-Procurement and Web-Based Supply Chain Management
;
Interactive and Multimedia Web Applications
;
Internet and Collaborative Computing
;
Intranet and Extranet Business Applications
;
Object Orientation in Internet and Distributed Computing
;
Semantic Web Technologies
;
Services Science
;
Society, e-Business and e-Government
;
Software Agents and Internet Computing
;
Web Information Systems and Technologies
Abstract:
In the current competitive industrial context, enterprises must react swiftly to market changes. In order to face this problem, enterprises must increase their collaborative activities. This implies at one hand high communication between their information systems and at the other hand the compatibility of their practices. An important amount of work must be performed towards proper practices of standardization and harmonization. This is the concept of Interoperability. Interoperability of enterprises is a strategic issue, caused as well as enabled by the continuously growing ability of integration of new legacy and evolving systems, in particular in the context of networked organisations. of the reconciliation of the communicated business semantics is crucial to success. For this,
non-disruptive re-use of existing business data stored in “legacy” production information systems is an evident prerequisite. In addition the integration of a methodology as well as the scalability of any
proposed semantic technological solution are equally evident prerequisites. Yet on all accounts current semantic technologies as researched and developed for the so-called Semantic Web may be found lacking. In this paper we present a methodology, which has resulted in the implementation of a highly customizable collaborative environment focussed to support ontology-based enterprise interoperability. The main benefit of this environment is its ability to integrate with legacy systems, rescuing enterprises from having to adapt or upgrade their existing systems in order to interoperate with their partners.
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