A Framework for Semantic Enterprise Integration

Nowadays, Enterprise Integration (EI) constitutes a real and growing need for most of enterprises, especially for large and dynamic ones. It constitutes the main approach to deal with heterogeneity, and particularly to deal with semantic heterogeneity, which it forms the crucial problem of EI. This last problem is not correctly addressed by today's EI solutions that focus mainly on the technical and syntactical integration. Addressing the semantic aspect will promote EI by providing it more consistency and flexibility. Some efforts are suggested to solve the semantic problem at different level, but they are still not mature. Here, solutions based on service-oriented architectures and semantic web are promoted as nirvana of the integration problem, and they are being actively researched. The paper will outline the potential role that semantic web technologies can offer in solving some key challenges such as semantic mediation. In particular, the paper will propose a flexible approach called ODSOI (Ontology-Driven Service-Oriented Integration) that aims to extend the state-of-the-art in EAI in order to address the