Ontology-Driven Enterprise Application Integration

A major hurdle in Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is the semantic heterogeneity of data and applications. Today's integration solutions focus mainly on the physical and syntactical aspect, providing little or no mechanism for semantic integration. No shared semantic concepts are explicitly used to define the semantics of different pieces of exchanged data, therefore the developer has to hard-code what to do with each data item from each application. Ontologies are recognized as a most appropriate technology to overcome the limitations of current integration practices. Actually, they make possible the definition of a commonly agreed semantic model which can be reused and shared across applications. We propose the use of an ontological model to capture both technical and semantic issues of a given integration project and to use that model to identify and validate integration components, as well as to validate the consistency of system configuration. Furthermore, since the ontological model can be accessed programmatically from conventional languages (e.g. Java), the contents of the messages exchanged among integration components are actually ontologies, guaranteing the semantic consistency of exchanged data.