Sustainable Enterprise Interoperability in Dynamic Collaborative Environments: A Knowledge Link Approach

In complex and collaborative ecosystems, different partners need to share their respective expert knowledge in order to be successful. Due to the diversity of business applications and highly customized application suites used by business partners, knowledge exchange and the establishment of interoperability between enterprise applications is extremely difficult. Different meanings of enterprise data lead to incomprehensibility between partners. This paper presents a model-driven approach to support sustainable interoperability for enterprise applications in collaborative environments. Knowledge Links enable dynamic modelling of knowledge transformations between knowledge domains and keep background consistency between the connected domains. Knowledge Links can be created and modified at any time, which enables sustainable interoperability. Business partners may rely on their enterprise applications and sensitive data stays covert due to the nature of modular ontologies. The presented approach is exemplified in the context of the OSMOSE Project and will be evaluated by the proof-of-concept scenarios in this Project.