The competitiveness of an enterprise nowadays largely depends on its ability to collaborate with other organizations. Enterprises increasingly focus on their core competences and outsource others. Business opportunities are created through the smart combination of services and products that are offered by other organizations. However, since the operational processes of organizations are increasingly automated using software applications, the collaboration between organizations increasingly depends on the successful cooperation of these software applications.

Enterprise Interoperability (EI) is the discipline that is concerned with enabling the cooperation between business applications within or across organizations. The integration of software applications from different organizations is a major challenge. In general, these applications have not been designed with cooperation in mind, resulting in incompatible data models and message exchange protocols.  Furthermore, applications may have been implemented by different vendors using different software technology.

Over the past 5 years, we have investigated methods and tools to facilitate the integration of software applications. This has resulted in the development of an innovative integration approach with the following properties:

·      Business-driven. The business stakeholders are actively involved as domain experts in the creation of the integration solution. This guarantees that the integration solution meets the demands of the business and thus increases the chance of a successful integration. 

·      Model-driven. Simple and intuitive models are used to describe, analyze and communicate the integration solution. From these models, the software implementation of the solution can be generated automatically. This makes the approach flexible, fast, reproducible, and independent of specific and contemporary technologies.

·      Semantics-driven. Models capture the semantics of the integration problem precisely, enabling the use of automated techniques to analyze and reason about the integration problem and its possible solutions. This increases the quality of the solution and paves the way to modern techniques for the semi-automated generation of integration solutions. 

The project developed a novel method and supporting tools for Enterprise Interoperability. The quality of the method was convincingly demonstrated at the 7th Semantic Web Services Challenge Workshop in October 2008, where our team could successfully solve the surprise scenario without modifications to the software code.

For more information, contact the project manager Stanislav Pokraev (mailto:stanislav.pokr...@novay.nl)