Business Process Integration within Lightweight Semantic-Enabled Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture

Introduction

It is very rare nowadays to find any enterprise that is based merely on a single information system. Rather it has a bundle of systems specialized for different organizational sections within the business. As far as e-procurement is concerned, the most three significant systems are Supply Chain Management (SCM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. One of the most problematic issues that these businesses have to overcome is the integration issue. In clearer words, how to handle the data exchange among heterogeneous dissimilar information systems? We will try to answer this question in this chapter by proposing our approach.

The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows: section two will provide background information about service orientation and business process management. A literature review and brief comparison between the proposed approach and existing frameworks and techniques is presented in section three. Section four presents the semantic-enabled SOA concept together with its main components interactions. Section five details a business case built on top of the proposed concept with highlights on its corresponding prototype. The main system’s outcomes are then listed in section six. Finally, we conclude the chapter and present a brief outlook and future directions.