Chapter X Achieving System and Business Interoperability

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Chapter XAchieving System and Business

Interoperability by Semantic Web Services

John KrogstieNorwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway

SINTEF ICT, Norway

Csaba VeresNorwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway

Guttorm SindreNorwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway

Øyvind SkytøenNorwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway

ABSTRACT

Much of the early focus in the area of Semantic Web has been on the development of representation lan-guages for static conceptual information; while there has been less emphasis on how to make Semantic Web applications practically useful in the context of knowledge work. To achieve this, a better coupling is needed between ontology, service descriptions, and workflow modeling, including both traditional production workflow and interactive workflow techniques. This chapter reviews the basic technologies involved in this area to provide system and business interoperability, and outlines what can be achieved by merging them in the context of real-world workflow descriptions.

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Achieving System and Business Interoperability by Semantic Web Services

CONCLUSION AND FURTHER WORK

This paper has provided a survey of relevant technologies for achieving semantic interoperability in the context of enterprise information systems, namely ontologies, service descriptions, and tool support frameworks for developing and executing service-oriented applications, as well as workflow models including both automated and interactive tasks. The overview of interoperability between different platforms, together with the example explanations of this, illustrates how the combination of these technologies can provide more advanced interoperability than with current systems.

We suggest that “interoperability” in the abstract may be an untenable goal, at least in the immediate future. But interoperability in the context of dynamic and interactive workflows, as the next best thing, is very much within our reach. Important future work on our approach is as indicated above related to integrating the results from the current work on semantic web services, in addition to operationalizing the semantic annotation approach.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Csaba Veres was funded by the Norwegian Research Council through the WISEMOD project while much of the work behind this paper was carried out. John Krogstie has in addition been funded by the projects ATHENA (http://www.athena-ip.org) and the Norwegian Research Council-project MONESA. The ideas of this paper were pursued in the context of the EU NoE project INTEROP and its continu-ation INTEROP-VLab, and we thank other partners of INTEROP for valuable inspiration. The paper does not represent the view of the funding organizations or project consortia and the authors are solely responsible for the paper’s content.

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ENDNOTES

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Chapter X Achieving System and Business Interoperability