Enterprise Interoperability

INTEROP-PGSO Vision

Bernard Archimède, Bruno Vallespir, Bernard Archimède, Bruno Vallespir

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781786300843
• eBook ISBN: 9781119407911
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Industrial Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Interoperability of enterprises is one of the main requirements for economical and industrial collaborative networks. Enterprise interoperability (EI) is based on the three domains: architectures and platforms, ontologies and enterprise modeling.

This book presents the EI vision of the "Grand Sud-Ouest" pole (PGSO) of the European International Virtual Laboratory for Enterprise Interoperability (INTEROP-VLab). It includes the limitations, concerns and approaches of EI, as well as a proposed framework which aims to define and delimit the concept of an EI domain.

The authors present the basic concepts and principles of decisional interoperability as well as concept and techniques for interoperability measurement. The use of these previous concepts in a healthcare ecosystem and in an extended administration is also presented.

1
Framework for Enterprise Interoperability

1.1. Introduction

Enterprise interoperability means many things to many people. It is interpreted in many different ways in different contexts with different expectations [CHE 03, CHE 04]. This is not only true in industry but also in research communities and sometimes even within a working group. Without a clear and shared understanding on the precise meaning of interoperability, research and development efforts cannot be efficiently carried out and coordinated. The proposed Framework for Enterprise Interoperability aims, on the one hand, to clarify the enterprise interoperability concept, and, on the other hand, to define and delimit the enterprise interoperability domain [INT 07].

The Framework for Enterprise Interoperability was developed under European FP6 NoE INTEROP (Interoperability Research for Networked Enterprises Applications and Software) [INT 03]. It was inspired from or influenced by the following works: LISI (Levels of Information Systems Interoperability) [C4I 98], IDEAS Interoperability Framework [IDE 03], European Interoperability Framework [EIF 04] and ATHENA Interoperability Framework [ATH 03].

Enterprise interoperability defined in this framework is considered as the ability to (1) communicate and exchange information, (2) use the information exchanged and (3) access to functionality of a third system. This definition is based on some existing ones defined in [IEE 90, VER 96, IDE 03]. It has been considered that enterprise systems are not interoperable because of barriers to interoperability. Barriers are incompatibilities of various kinds at the various enterprise levels. There exist common barriers to interoperability and generic solutions to remove those barriers.

1.2. Enterprise interoperability concepts

There are many concepts relating to interoperability. This section focuses on the basic concepts for the purpose of helping to understand the framework for enterprise interoperability and its underlying domain. These concepts are identified based on the state-of-the-art of relevant interoperability researches [INT 04].

1.2.1. Interoperability barriers

Interoperability barriers are a fundamental concept for understanding interoperability problems. Many interoperability problems are specific to particular application domains. These can be issues like support for particular attributes or particular access control regimes. However, general barriers or problems of interoperability exist and can be identified; and most of them being already addressed [KAS 04, EIF 04, ERI 04]. Consequently, the objective is to identify and categorize those common barriers to interoperability. The term “barrier” means an “incompatibility” or “mismatch” that obstructs the sharing and exchanging of information. Three categories of barriers are identified: (a) conceptual, (b) technological and (c) organizational.

a) Conceptual barriers

Conceptual barriers are concerned with the syntactic and semantic incompatibilities of information to be exchanged. These problems concern the representation of information at the high level of abstraction (such as, for example, the enterprise models of a company) as well as the level of programming (for example, low capacity of semantic representation of XML):

• – syntactic incompatibility can be found whenever different people or systems use different structures (or format) to represent information and knowledge. To tackle this problem, the UEML initiative [UEM 01] developed a neutral model to allow mapping between different enterprise models built with different syntaxes;
• – semantic incompatibility is seen as an important barrier to interoperability as the information and knowledge represented in most of the models or software have no clearly defined semantics to allow unambiguous understanding of the meaning of information. At the current stage of research, the most known technique to solve this problem is semantic annotation and reconciliation using ontology.

Conceptual barriers are the main barriers to interoperability.

b) Technological barriers

Technological barriers are concerned with the use of computers or ICT (Information and Communication Technology) to communicate and exchange information. Typical technological barriers are for example incompatibility of IT architecture & platforms, infrastructure, operating system, etc. From a purely technical perspective, these problems concern the ways to present, store, exchange, process and communicate data and information through the use of software systems. Examples of technological barriers are:

• – communication barriers, e.g. incompatibility of the protocols used to exchange information;
• – content barriers, e.g. different techniques and methods used to represent information, or incompatibility in the tools used to encode/decode the information being exchanged;
• – infrastructure barriers, e.g. use of different incompatible middleware platforms.

Technological barriers are additional barriers with respect to conceptual ones. They are caused by the use of computer. Technological barriers only exist if computers are involved in an interoperation.

c) Organizational barriers

Organizational barriers are concerned with the incompatibilities of organization structure and management techniques implemented in two enterprises. For example, one organization structure barrier is related to the way of assigning responsibility and authority. Indeed, if two companies have different organization structures (e.g. hierarchical vs. networked) and management techniques, some necessary mappings may need to be done before the two sides become interoperable at an operational level:

• – responsibility needs to be defined to allow two parties knowing who is responsible for what (process, data, software, etc.). If responsibility in an enterprise is not clearly and explicitly defined, interoperation between two systems may be obstructed;
• – authority is an organizational concept which defines who is authorized to do what. For example, it is necessary to define who is authorized to create, modify, maintain data, processes, services, etc.;
• – organization structure refers to the style by which responsibility, authority and decision-making are organized. For example, we can talk about centralized versus decentralized organizations, or hierarchical versus matrix or networked organization structures.

Organizational barriers are also additional barriers. Compared with conceptual barriers (centered on information problems) and technological barriers (concerned with IT problems), organizational barriers originate from the problems of humans.

1.2.2. Interoperability concerns

This section defines the interoperations that can take place from the various concerns (or viewpoints) of the enterprise. Although the definitions are mainly given from the point of view of IT-based applications, they apply to non-computerized systems as well. This categorization is based on the ATHENA Technical Framework [GUG 05].

The interoperability of communication is a basic condition to allow for interoperability to take place. It relates primarily to the interconnection of syst...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Framework for Enterprise Interoperability
• 2 Networked Companies and a Typology of Collaborations
• 3 Designing Natively Interoperable Complex Systems: An Interface Design Pattern Proposal
• 4 Software Development and Interoperability: A Metric-based Approach
• 5 Decisional Interoperability
• 6 The Interoperability Measurement
• 7 Interoperability and Supply Chain Management
• 8 Organizational Interoperability Between Public and Private Actors in an Extended Administration
• 9 An Inventory of Interoperability in Healthcare Ecosystems: Characterization and Challenges
• List of Authors
• Index
• End User License Agreement