A Systemic Approach to Interoperability Formalization

Journal of Industrial Information Integration, 2019

Enterprise Interoperability is a requirement for ensuring an effective collaboration within a network of enterprises. Therefore, interoperability should be continuously assessed and improved for avoiding collaboration issues. To do so, an interoperability assessment can be performed by the concerned enterprises. Such an assessment provides an overview of the enterprise systems' strengths and weaknesses regarding interoperability. A plethora of assessment approaches are proposed in the literature. The majority of them focus on one single aspect of interoperability. In general, to have a holistic view of the assessed systems, i.e. consider different aspects, enterprises have to apply different approaches. However, the application of multiple approaches may cause redundancy and confusion when assessing the same system using different metrics and viewpoints. Therefore, this article is to propose an ontology for interoperability assessment. The main objective of such an ontology is to provide a sound description of all relevant concepts and relationships regarding an interoperability assessment. Inference rules are also provided for reasoning on interoperability problems. A case study based on a real enterprise in presented to evaluate the proposed ontology.

2010

This paper presents relevant interoperability approaches and solutions applied to global/international networked (collaborative) enterprises or organisations and conceptualise an enhanced enterprise interoperability framework. The paper covers several key aspects including how holistic approaches of architecting principles, standards and semantics contribute to the development of an interoperability framework that can be flexibly used for interoperable complex systems, particularly ICT, that support global enterprises including organisations from multiple countries, e.g. European and African organisations. This proposed comprehensive approach of interoperability covers not only technical aspects, but also semantics alongside organisational and cultural aspects. The use of systems engineering thinking and architecting for achieving interoperability of complex systems is suggested.

Enterprise Interoperability II, 2007

The ability of a system to interoperate with another is a multi-dimensional concern which must be considered simultaneously from different perspectives and covering all the concerns relevant for different stakeholders. In this paper, we present a model of interoperability for service-based inter-enterprise computing environments which is based on the Ontology of Interoperability (OoI) developed under INTEROP-NoE and the Pilarcos framework for federated service communities. We propose a refined version of the OoI, generalizing the originally considered scope of interoperability and adding concepts required to address dynamic aspects in interoperability. The ontology is then specialized to the domain of federated service-based communities and we illustrate with some concrete examples how interoperability problems and solutions in that domain could be related to it.

The new economy and business needs lead enterprises to be interoperable in order to be competitive and sustain new market opportunities that will result from cooperation with other enterprises. Easy ways to establish business with customers and suppliers or other enterprises are needed. Within this framework various studies on how to establish interoperability among specific enterprises, supply chains and virtual enterprises, or for specific sectors, have been successfully conducted and applied. The methodological proposal described in this paper will lead enterprises to achieve an advantage situation regarding their maturity level of interoperability. It supports enterprises to be prepared to interoperate, and this aspect can be a key issue for other enterprises to select them in new businesses or new collaborative projects.

International Journal of E-Business Research, 2014

The obligation to become more competitive and effective in providing better products and services requires enterprises to transform from traditional businesses into networked businesses. One of the challenges faced by a network of enterprises is the development of interoperability between its members. Transformations in this context are usually driven by Enterprise Interoperability (EI) problems that may be faced. In order to quickly overcome these problems, enterprises need characterizing and assessing interoperability to be prepared to establish means for collaboration and initiate corrective actions before potential interoperability problems occur and then be obliged to make unprepared transformations that may be costly and induce unmanageable issues. This has become a significant research challenge over the past few years and maturity models have been developed in response to this challenge. In this paper we propose to extend a maturity model based on an ontological formalizatio...