Vertical integration of enterprise industrial systems utilizing Web services

The need for interoperability is prominent in the industrial enterprise environment. Different applications and systems that cover the overall range of the industrial infrastructure from the field to the enterprise level need to interoperate. This quest is driven by the enterprise need for greater flexibility and for the wider possible integration of the enterprise systems. The current paper presents an architecture that utilizes three predominant state-of-the-art technologies, namely workflows, ontologies and Web services in order to address the above quest in an efficient way.