Abstract
Many interoperable frameworks have been suggested, developed and implemented in the past. Most of them are based on XML, Web services and Semantic Web technologies. In the meantime, globalization, and the further development of Internet and Web have raised new challenges and opportunities. New form of networked organizations, known as virtual enterprises, seeks for knowledge sharing around common goals. The raise of social and ubiquitous world, where everything is going to be connected gives a lot of technical opportunities for electronic business, but at same time makes new barriers due to increasing heterogeneity issues. This article gives an overview of main challenges, obstacles, approaches, recent research efforts, and forecasts in order to overcome recent interoperability problems.
TopThe Issues And Challenges Of Enterpsise Interoperability
The Web is the backbone of a new social era -a more open, global, ubiquitous, and pervasive platform. People, software, and things are part of a new era in which almost “everything” will be socially connected as shown in Figure 1. We refer to it as the Social World. The complexity of social world calls for mutual understanding of all entities involved. Besides many initiatives, ideas, and particular platform-to-platform solutions, connecting all by mutual understanding and self-learning capabilities is yet a big challenge (Dorloff & Kajan, 2012).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Interoperability: An attribute given to systems, applications and data that assigns their ability to communicate with another systems, applications and data in a manner that they may exchange and mutually use that data.
ZLE (Zero Latency Enterprise): A BE that has been reached the full A2A integration so that there is no data latency between its own business processes.
Virtual Enterprise (VE): A temporary alliance of BEs that come together to jointly fulfill common business goals.
Middleware: A dynamic self-organized layer, usually acting on the top of the transport layer, that provides uniformity between the lower layers of the framework (hardware, operating systems, etc.), which are different by default, and hides serious, natural discrepancies that exist among applications.
Business Entity (BE): An enterprise, a part of an enterprise and/or its application that participate in A2A or B2B.
A2A (Application-to-Application): Process of data and application integration inside an enterprise in order to reach ZLE. Also know as EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) and EII (Enterprise Information Integration).
Framework: A common template that has well defined functionality in order to solve a problem, e.g. interoperability, and precisely defined inputs and outputs intended for its communication with the external world.
B2B (Business-to-Business): Type of EC where participating entities are enterprises at both sides. Nowadays, it may be thought as a third wave of EC, where BEs should be able to establish and handle their business relationship dynamically and seamlessly on demand.
EC (Electronic Commerce): An emerging concept that describes the process of buying, selling, or exchanging data, services and products over the Internet.