Towards an Enhanced Interoperability Service Utility

This chapter suggests an innovative approach towards establishing Enterprise Interoperability in the everyday electronic transactions among the contemporary enterprise information systems. Based on the rather cutting-edge concept of the “Interoperability Service Utility (ISU),” enriched with a concrete methodology for ontologies’ reconciliation, the authors suggest an enhanced ISU that would serve as a mediator among the incompatible enterprise information systems, providing semantic harmonization of the exchanged knowledge and a fertile ground for achieving Enterprise Interoperability and Collaboration. The authors’ proposition and methodology can constitute a high quality scientific and supportive material for any stakeholder in the enterprise field, giving useful directions for any other similar implementation and contributing to the scientific aspect of Enterprise Interoperability.

A Case for Enterprise Interoperability in Healthcare IT

The PHR systems need to be integrated with a wide variety of healthcare IT systems including EHRs, electronic medical devices, and clinical decision support services to get their full benefit. It is not possible to sustain the integration of PHRs with other healthcare IT systems in a proprietary way; this integration has to be achieved by exploiting the promising interoperability standards and profiles. This chapter provides a survey and analysis of the interoperability standards and profiles that can be used to integrate PHRs with a variety of healthcare applications and medical data resources, including EHR systems to enable access of a patient to his own medical data generated by healthcare professionals; personal medical devices to obtain the patient’s instant physiological status; and the clinical decision support services for patient-physician shared decision making.

Interoperable Process Engineering System for Collaborative Optimization of Product Life-Cycle

Most of the industrial organizations, including SMEs, need to quickly react and adapt to the changing market conditions imposed by globalization, such as new sustainability directives or new type of customers. The fulfillment of these requirements on time is a must so as to remain competitive in the global markets. Since data management information systems are already present in almost all the corpus of industrial enterprises as custom developments or standard PLM solutions, the natural technical evolution that aims to provide an effective answer to these changing market conditions comprises the shifting from a data management perspective towards a process management view. Hence, the challenge is how to manage business processes that build upon existing information systems so as to encourage business agility, efficiency, and interoperability. The proposed approach roots on the Business Process Management (BPM) discipline and leverages process optimization through the systematic modeling and reengineering of business processes accompanied by supporting interoperable and configurable eco-services, which are conceived as sustainability-aware services designed to optimize some aspects of the product life-cycle through eco-constraints management.

Interoperability in Service-Oriented Production Networks

How can complex relationship structures be managed? When collaborating in networks, the diversity of stakeholder relationships is increasing. Most times, this leads to interoperability issues that need to be addressed. In this chapter, the authors show how Anything Relationship Management (xRM) can increase interoperability in many-to-many (n:n) relationships. Building upon relationship management theory, they firstly categorize different types of relationships and link them with fitting IT solutions. The authors then give a brief introduction to the xRM concept. Following and more specifically, they present the EU research project GloNet1 and propose three technical xRM approaches (collaboration spaces, integration of external services, and synchronization framework) in order to improve social network interoperability, services interoperability, and data interoperability. The chapter closes with a conclusion, an example of application, and a research outlook.

A Taxonomy of Scientific Areas Driving Assessment of Organisations Readiness

Enterprise Interoperability is one of the most crucial research domains of the modern information age, as it is directly linked with the competitiveness of enterprises as it defines at a large extent the ability of an enterprise to take advantage of the productivity gains offered by the ICT solutions available. However, although various solutions and best practises are emerging on a daily basis, it is the fragmented analysis of the domain that restrains the birth of holistic solutions that will provide the needed leverage to enterprises. Motivated by this situation, this chapter provides an analysis of the different scientific areas that can be found under the Enterprise Interoperability landscape and proposes an assessment framework which may support the identification of the current interoperability profile of an organisation while it reveals various solution paths that could be developed in order to gradually improve the interoperability status of the latter.

An Enterprise Interoperability Framework based on Compliance and Conformance

The existing interoperability frameworks usually take an application-driven, top-down approach, in which the most relevant dimensions of interoperability are optimized for some problem space. For example, The European Interoperability Framework has been conceived primarily to support e-Government services. With the goal of contributing to the establishment of the scientific foundations of interoperability, this chapter presents a multidimensional interoperability framework, conceived in a generic, bottom-up approach. The basic tenet is to add an interoperability dimension (based on the concepts of compliance and conformance) to an enterprise architecture framework with lifecycle and concreteness as its main dimensions, forming a universal core framework. This core is then provided with an extensibility mechanism, based on a concerns dimension, into which the specific characteristics of applications and their domains can be added to instantiate the framework, now in an application-driven fashion. The most relevant concerns, with sufficient applicability breadth, can be promoted to full dimensions and extend the framework. The use of partial compliance and conformance reduces coupling while still allowing interoperability, which increases adaptability, changeability, and reliability, thereby contributing to a sustainable interoperability.

Collaboration and Interoperability within a Virtual Enterprise Applied in a Mobile Maintenance Scenario

This chapter presents an infrastructure approach for virtual enterprises developed by the consortium of the European research project ComVantage and discusses its impact with respect to the mobile maintenance domain. The approach focuses on the core aspects of interoperability, which are data interoperability and process interoperability. Regarding the interorganisational access to enterprise data, the authors propose a semantic abstraction layer that is completely decentralised and therefore meets the key requirement of virtuality. The execution of business processes and workflows across organisational boundaries are addressed by the unique App Orchestration Concept.

The Multidimensional Business Value of Information Systems Interoperability

The creation of complete scientific foundations in the IS interoperability domain necessitates not only the development of mature and widely applicable interoperability architectures, methods, and standards, but also the systematic investigation of the business value they generate. This chapter initially analyses the theoretical foundations of the multi-dimensional business value of IS interoperability and then reviews the quite limited empirical literature on it. Next, it presents an empirical study of the business value generated by the adoption of three main types of IS interoperability standards: industry-specific, proprietary, and XML-horizontal ones. It is based on a large dataset from 14065 European firms (from 25 countries and 10 sectors) collected through the e-Business Watch Survey of the European Commission. It is concluded that all three types of IS interoperability standards increase considerably the positive impact of firm’s ICT infrastructure on two important performance dimensions: business processes performance and innovation. However, the effects of these three types of standards differ significantly: the adoption of industry-specific IS interoperability standards has the highest positive impacts, while proprietary and XML-horizontal ones have similar lower impacts. Furthermore, it is concluded that the industry-specific and the proprietary interoperability standards also have positive impacts even at the level of firm’s financial performance.

Science-Base Research for Advanced Interoperability

Studies show that enterprises are severely constrained by their management structures, and that those constraints become more vexing as information technologies are adopted. This is more true as “interoperability engineering” advances; the enterprise is capable of doing simple, ordinary things better, but the form of the enterprise becomes less adaptive, less agile as external firms are integrated in using lowest common denominator standards. The net result is that we are worse off now because of the constraints of integration decisions. A radical advance is required, one based on breakthroughs in the underlying science used by enterprise engineers. This chapter indicates one advanced form of enterprise that current research could make possible and uses it to illustrate desired enterprise engineering tools. It then suggests an agenda for fundamental research to support those goals.

Attaining Semantic Enterprise Interoperability through Ontology Architectural Patterns

Enterprise Interoperability Science Base (EISB) represents the wide range of interoperability techniques that allow the creation of a new enterprise application by utilizing technologies with varied data formats and different paradigms. Even if one is able to bridge across these formats and paradigms to interoperate a new application, one crucial consideration is the semantic interoperability to insure that similar data is reconciled that might be stored differently from a semantic perspective. In support of this requirement, usage of ontologies is gaining increasing attention as they capture shareable domain knowledge semantics. The design and deployment of an ontology for any system is very specific, created in isolation to suit the specific needs with limited reuse in the same domain. The broad proliferation of ontologies for different systems, which, while similar in content, are often semantically different, can significantly inhibit the information exchange across enterprise systems. This situation is attributed, in part, to a lack of a software-engineering-based approach for ontologies; an ontology is often designed and built using domain data, while software design involves abstract modeling concepts that promote abstraction, reusability, interoperability, etc. The intent in this chapter is to define ontologies by leveraging software design pattern concepts to more effectively design ontologies. To support this, the chapter proposes Ontology Architectural Patterns (OAPs), which are higher-level abstract reusable templates with well-defined structures and semantics to conceptualize modular ontology models at the domain model level. OAP borrows from software design patterns inheriting their key characteristics for supporting enterprise semantic ontology interoperability.