Ontology Based Cross-Domain Enterprises Integration and Interoperability

Web services are gaining momentum as key elements in cross-domain enterprises integration because more and more functions within intra- and inter-enterprises have been encapsulated as Web services. However, these services are typically provided and invoked by different service providers in different enterprises distributed in multi-domains, so it is inevitable to face the problem of semantic inconsistency during enterprise integrating and cooperating. In this paper, ontology is brought out to solve this problem by building reference ontologies corresponding to each domain, and then collaboration ontologies are constructed semi-automatically, where after OWL-S files generated from collaboration ontologies are mapped to BPEL and WSDL files respectively. By this way, the semantic information will be kept in processes and Web services, so that there is common understanding among cross-domain cooperating enterprises. The OCDEII system architecture is proposed to support such integration and interoperability and further a prototype system is implemented in Project Import NET.