Enabling sustainable interoperability for enterprise applications with knowledge links

In complex and collaborative ecosystems like business networks, 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 representations and meanings of enterprise data lead to incomprehensibility between partners inside collaborative environments. This paper presents an model-driven approach to support sustainable interoperability for enterprise applications in collaborative environments. Based on an event-driven architecture, Knowledge Links enable dynamic modelling of knowledge transformations between knowledge domains. They keep background consistency between the connected domains, thus making enterprise applications interoperable. Knowledge Links can be created and modified at any time, which enables sustainable interoperability. Business partners are able to rely on their enterprise applications and don't need to switch to another system. 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.