AN ARCHITECTURE FOR INTEROPERABILITY OF ENTERPRISE INFORMATION SYSTEMS BASED ON SOA AND SEMANTIC WEB TECHNOLOGIES

Enterprises interoperability becomes a necessary and critical task for enterprises as the information and complexity of systems increase exponentially. To adapt existing information systems to new requirements and build bridges between them, a conceptual vision and understanding of interoperability can facilitate the technical development to reduce the conflicts and gaps between heterogeneous systems. Now the focus shifts from the syntactic concern to semantic issues. Semantic heterogeneity currently becomes the next barrier and challenge to face in enterprise interoperability, it promises to play a major role to enable interoperability of enterprise information systems. The approach can be transposed at enterprise decision level, where heterogeneous business processes also need to be interoperable. SOA helps to explore a loosely coupled architecture with many advantages, especially for enhancing interoperability among enterprises. To obtain business process interoperability, service orchestration and choreography could coordinate and compose the services and processes effectively. This paper, first gives a brief introduction of main issues in this domain, and then recalls a framework for enterprise interoperability. Based on these methodologies and the interoperability framework, a new architecture for enterprise interoperability of information systems using SOA ideology and semantic web technologies is proposed, whose final objective is to enable and enhance enterprise interoperability and then create business values.