The Role of Semantic Web Technology in Enterprise Application Integration

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) in today’s form focuses on the syntactic integration of application interfaces on an implementation technology level. Current EAI technology focuses on the “plumbing” aspect by emphasizing different technologies like queuing [5, 8] or remote invocations [12, 14]. A formal description of the semantics of the interfaces necessary to make integration work flawlessly is not supported by applications or integration technology in any explicit form yet, for example, as process models or formal ontologies. Instead, implementing the correct integration semantics is a human designer task and the result is consequently subject to mistakes and mis-interpretations. This article introduces a first step toward making formal semantics explicit in EAI.