Interoperable enterprise systems: Principles, concepts, and methods

Interoperable enterprise systems (be they supply chains, extended enterprises, or any form of virtual organizations) must be designed, controlled, and appraised from a holistic and systemic point of view. Systems interoperability is a key to enterprise integration, which recommends that the IT architecture and infrastructure be aligned with business process organization and control, themselves designed according to a strategic view expressed in an enterprise architecture. The paper discusses architectures and methods to build interoperable enterprise systems, advocating a mixed service and process orientation, to support synchronous and/or asynchronous operations, both at the business level (business events, business services, business processes) and at the application level (workflow, IT and Web services, application programs).     

A methodology for the semi-automatic creation of data-driven detailed business ontologies

In the context of technological expansion and development, companies feel the need to renew and optimize their information systems as they search for the best way to manage knowledge. Business ontologies within the semantic web are an excellent tool for managing knowledge within this space. The proposal in this article consists of a methodology for integrating information in companies. The application of this methodology results in the creation of a specific business ontology capable of semantic interoperability. The resulting ontology, developed from the information system of specific companies, represents the fundamental business concepts, thus making it a highly appropriate information integration tool. Its level of semantic expressivity improves on that of its own sources, and its solidity and consistency are guaranteed by means of checking by current reasoning tools. An ontology created in this way could drive the renewal processes of companies’ information systems. A comparison is also made with a number of well-known business ontologies, and similarities and differences are drawn, highlighting the difficulty in aligning general ontologies to specific ones, such as the one we present.     

Aondê: An ontology Web service for interoperability across biodiversity applications

Biodiversity research requires associating data about living beings and their habitats, constructing sophisticated models and correlating all kinds of information. Data handled are inherently heterogeneous, being provided by distinct (and distributed) research groups, which collect these data using different vocabularies, assumptions, methodologies and goals, and under varying spatio-temporal frames. Ontologies are being adopted as one of the means to alleviate these heterogeneity problems, thus helping cooperation among researchers. While ontology toolkits offer a wide range of operations, they are self-contained and cannot be accessed by external applications. Thus, the many proposals for adopting ontologies to enhance interoperability in application development are either based on the use of ontology servers or of ontology frameworks. The latter support many functions, but impose application recoding whenever ontologies change, whereas the first supports ontology evolution, but for a limited set of functions.This paper presents Aondê—a Web service geared towards the biodiversity domain that combines the advantages of frameworks and servers, supporting ontology sharing and management on the Web. By clearly separating storage concerns from semantic issues, the service provides independence between ontology evolution and the applications that need them. The service provides a wide range of basic operations to create, store, manage, analyze and integrate multiple ontologies. These operations can be repeatedly invoked by client applications to construct more complex manipulations. Aondê has been validated for real biodiversity case studies.     

An ontology modelling perspective on business reporting

In this paper, we discuss the motivation and the fundamentals of an ontology representation of business reporting data and metadata structures as defined in the eXtensible business reporting language (XBRL) standard.     

数据联邦技术在系统集成中的应用与研究

为了使企业在激烈的市场中立于不败之地,提高企业的市场应变能力和管理水平,卷烟企业的信息化建设一直在快速发展,为烟草行业工业企业的现代化发挥了重要的作用。但单个系统独立运行已经不能满足日益增长的管理要求,需要各个系统在业务层、数据层高效统一集成,实现卷烟企业对内对外的协同生产和管理。本论文,以卷烟企业辅料管理相关系统集成为例,介绍了通过利用Web Service和DB2 Information Integrator(DB2 II)数据联邦两种集成方法的技术特点,阐述如何选择适合的集成技术对相关系统进行安全、有效集成。     

Web information fusion: A review of the state of the art

In this paper, we introduce and overview advances in the field of Web information fusion and integration. As it is such a broad and diverse topic that is researched in many different fields, we choose to provide a unified view by focusing on selected survey articles that extensively cover earlier research contributions. Given the important role that ontologies are playing in Web information fusion and the emergence and fast development of the Semantic Web and Web 3.0 technologies, a separate section is devoted to the topic of ontology research and the Semantic Web. Then, in the section on Web-based support systems, several applications that are enabled as the result of advances in Web information fusion are discussed.     

Ontologies are not the Panacea in Data Integration: A Flexible Coordinator to Mediate Context Construction

Shared ontologies describe concepts and relationships to resolve semantic conflicts amongst users accessing multiple autonomous and heterogeneous information sources. We contend that while ontologies are useful in semantic reconciliation, they do not guarantee correct classification of semantic conflicts, nor do they provide the capability to handle evolving semantics or a mechanism to support a dynamic reconciliation process. Their limitations are illustrated through a conceptual analysis of several prominent examples used in heterogeneous database systems and in natural language processing. We view semantic reconciliation as a nonmonotonic query-dependent process that requires flexible interpretation of query context, and as a mechanism to coordinate knowledge elicitation while constructing the query context. We propose a system that is based on these characteristics, namely the SCOPES (Semantic Coordinator Over Parallel Exploration Spaces) system. SCOPES takes advantage of ontologies to constrain exploration of a remote database during the incremental discovery and refinement of the context within which a query can be answered. It uses an Assumption-based Truth Maintenance System (ATMS) to manage the multiple plausible contexts which coexist while the semantic reconciliation process is unfolding, and the Dempster-Shafer (DS) theory of belief to model the likelihood of these plausible contexts.     

Consistency in multi-viewpoint design of enterprise information systems

Different stakeholders in the design of an enterprise information system have their own view on that design. To help produce a coherent design this paper presents a framework that aids in specifying relations and consistency rules between such views. The contribution of our framework is that it provides a collection of basic concepts. These basic concepts aid in relating viewpoints by providing: (i) a common terminology that helps stakeholders to understand each others concepts; and (ii) re-usable consistency rules. We show that our framework can be applied, by performing a case study in which we specify the relations and consistency rules between three RM-ODP viewpoints.     

基于共享基础数据的信息系统集成方案

为解决企业信息系统集成中跨系统数据访问难的问题,提出基于共享基础数据资源的企业信息基础设施建设的理论基础、整体框架和实施方案.通过分析企业各种应用系统中所涉及的共享基础数据,构建基于共享基础数据资源平台的企业信息系统整体框架,并简单介绍按此方法实施的一个企业信息化基础设施建设的实际例子.     

A Patchwork Planet Integration and Cooperation in Hospitals

The `seamless' integration of a collectionof information systems has been recognised asvital in promoting and realising thecollaborative aspects of work. This emphasis onthe collaborative role of integrationsupplements other studies in CSCW focusing onmore singular tools for collaboration.Empirically, we analyse the design and use ofan electronic patient record system (EPR) inlarge hospitals in Norway. We discuss theconditions for and types of integration of EPRwith the host of related information systems inhospitals. We formulate design principles forthe integration of collaborative informationsystems based on a pragmatic study of theproductive role of redundant, fragmented andambiguous information.     

A formal approach to perfective software maintenance: System integration using a basis of formal object-oriented components

We investigate how a formalism known as a basis and common to many areas of applied mathematics and engineering can be applied to perfective maintenance and the integration of application systems in software engineering, using an object-oriented approach. It is concluded that this formalism serves as a mathematical model for perfective software maintenance and software systems integration activities under object-oriented development. Theorems and properties about the model are reported as guides to software maintenance. The model and formal maintenance techniques have been applied to a software system in the management information systems area to demonstrate this approach to perfective maintenance and to assist in validating the model.