What is Conceptual Model

For decades, companies have been sharing data electronically. Especially the popularity of the World Wide Web has helped e-business to develop further. Nevertheless, integrating business in and between enterprises often still requires extensive manual preparations. The basis for engineering businesses is their comprehensive and accurate description. Support is often provided by e-business standards offering guidelines for describing business data and logic and through the use of models. However, caused by the use of differing modeling languages and the multitude of the e-business standards available, the adoption of a standard still is a major effort. Aligning a company’s legacy models to one or even more standards’ specifications often involves extensive manual work for semantic analysis and the search for semantic correspondences. For easing this workload, in this chapter it is suggested to apply semantic technologies and a method presented developed in providing automated support for the semantic alignment of models and standards.