Choreography frameworks for business integration: Addressing heterogeneous semantics

Choreography is an essential element of business integration that allows the modeling of the external behavior of services for a specific interchange or collaboration. Existing service-oriented technologies attempt to model such external visible behavior. However, they lack the decoupling and consistent semantic support required in heterogeneous B2B environments. This paper describes the practical application of SOPHIE, a semantic web service-based choreography framework, to generic Request for Quote (RFQ) and quote processes based on the OAGIS canonical model. In doing so, the paper has the objective of showing how existing limitations are overcome, by means of the intermediate structures that conciliate the heterogeneities between services from the semantic descriptions of the message exchange patterns (MEPs) they follow. The essential elements of the framework are briefly presented, describing compatibility in terms of ontology mapping, so the basis for understanding the applicability of the SOPHIE philosophy to general business integration is clear. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.