Tuple-based semantic and structural mapping for a sustainable interoperability

Abstract. Enterprises are demanded to collaborate and establish partnerships to reach global business and markets. However, due to the different sources of models and semantics, organizations are experiencing difficulties exchanging vital information electronically and seamlessly, even when they operate in related business environments. This situation is even worst in the advent of the evolution of the enterprise systems and applications, whose dynamics result in increasing the interoperability problem due to the continuous need for model adjustments and semantics harmonization. To contribute for a long term stable interoperable enterprise operating environment, the authors propose the integration of traceability functionalities in information systems as a way to support such sustainability. Either data, semantic, and structural mappings between partner enterprises in the complex network should be modelled as tuples and stored in a knowledge base for communication support with reasoning capabilities, thus allowing to trace, monitor and support the stability maintenance of a system's interoperable state

Standards Framework for Intelligent Manufacturing Systems Supply Chain

ISBN 979-953-307-708-5 http://www.intechopen.com/articles/show/title/standards-framework-for-intelligent-manufacturing-systems-supply-chain#referenceThe global market is striving to increase competitiveness among organizations and networks. Nowadays, management of supply chains does not only consider business processes in the traditional value chain, but also processes that penetrate networks of organisations. Indeed, the formation of cooperation and collaboration partnerships between several small organizations can be, in multiple cases, more efficient by comparison with big companies (Rudberg et al., 2002). This way, the research on supply chain management has turned from an intra-enterprise focus towards an inter-enterprise focus with companies looking for enhanced interoperability between computer systems and applications. Supply chain networks are characterized by different structures such as, business processes and technological, organizational, topological, informational, and financial structures. All are interrelated but following their own dynamics. Thus, in order to ensure a high responsiveness level, the supply chain plans must be formed robustly and extremely quickly in relation to all the structures (Gupta & Maranas, 2003). In fact, with regards to supply chain in the advent of globalization, one of the difficulties enterprises are facing is the lack of interoperability of systems and software applications to manage and orchestrate the different structures involved (Jardim-Goncalves et al. 2006; Panetto et al., 2006; Farinha et al., 2007). The increasing need for cooperation and collaboration together with the rapid advances in information and communication technology (ICT) have brought supply chain planning into the forefront of the business practices of most manufacturing and service organizations (Gupta & Maranas, 2003). Moreover, there has been a growing interest and research in e-business solutions to facilitate information sharing between organisations in the supply chain network

Tuple-based morphisms for interoperability establishment of financial information models

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e ComputadoresThe current financial crisis has demonstrated that there is a need for financial accounting data in a format which can be rapidly analyzed and exchanged. The appearance of XBRL in 2000 has helped create a ‘de facto’ standard data format for the exchange of financial information. However, XBRL by itself is not capable of ensuring a common semantic for the exchange of accounting information. Additionally, the existence of different accounting standards in different countries is a hindrance to efficient analysis and evaluation of companies by international analysts or investors. Therefore, there is a need to not only use a more advanced data format, but also for tools which can facilitate the exchange of accounting data, in particular when different accounting standards are used. This dissertation presents a tuple-based semantic and structural mapping for interoperability establishment of financial information models based on the use of ontologies and a ‘Communication Mediator’. It allows the mapping of accounting concepts of different accounting standards to be stored in the ‘Communication Mediator’. The mapping stored contains an ATL code expression, which with the aid of model transformation tools, can be utilized to perform the mapping between two different accounting models

Methodology for collaborative enterprise reference ontology building

Dissertation presented at Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia of Universidade Nova de Lisboa to obtain the Master degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer ScienceIn the actual competitive world, doing business globally has become critical to the survival of most enterprises. It is becoming each day more and more difficult for small enterprises to grow by operating alone in the market. Hence, most companies started feeling the need for joining collaborative environments becoming easier to manage their products and services, and where they can offer better products with low production costs. To achieve this, enterprises require the establishment of cooperation agreements among each other with the idea of expanding their business networks. Consequently there is a demand for intelligent solutions capable of reinforcing partnerships and collaborations between enterprises, organised groups or singular people. However, due to the worldwide diversity of communities, a high number of knowledge representation elements, such as ontologies, which are not semantically coincident, have appeared representing the same segment of reality. Even operating in the same domain, enterprises do not understand each other, making the communication among various systems parties more difficult and sometimes impracticable. This dissertation responds to the needs identified above, proposing a collaborative methodology for ontology building, enriched with qualitative information collection methods, to effectively improve the approach to elicit knowledge from business domain experts, towards interoperable intelligent systems. This methodology allows different individuals from enterprises or organisations working on the same field or area, to join a collaborative environment for building a common ontology specific to their ―Domain of Discourse‖. To accomplish this, several steps are taken including terms and definitions gathering, glossary and thesaurus building, and ontology mapping

SCIF-IRIS Framework: A framework to facilitate interoperability in supply chains

One approach that allows improving the collaboration among all the enterprises within a supply chain is interoperability. Interoperability allows the enterprises in the supply chain to collaborate in an efficient manner while preserving their own identities and their own ways of doing business through mechanisms that act as facilitators. However, there are few real practical examples of supply chain interoperability that can be used as a reference. In this paper, we present a framework that can facilitate supply chain interoperability and an example of how it can be applied to a food supply chain

Semantic adaptability for the systems interoperability

In the current global and competitive business context, it is essential that enterprises adapt their knowledge resources in order to smoothly interact and collaborate with others. However, due to the existent multiculturalism of people and enterprises, there are different representation views of business processes or products, even inside a same domain. Consequently, one of the main problems found in the interoperability between enterprise systems and applications is related to semantics. The integration and sharing of enterprises knowledge to build a common lexicon, plays an important role to the semantic adaptability of the information systems. The author proposes a framework to support the development of systems to manage dynamic semantic adaptability resolution. It allows different organisations to participate in a common knowledge base building, letting at the same time maintain their own views of the domain, without compromising the integration between them. Thus, systems are able to be aware of new knowledge, and have the capacity to learn from it and to manage its semantic interoperability in a dynamic and adaptable way. The author endorses the vision that in the near future, the semantic adaptability skills of the enterprise systems will be the booster to enterprises collaboration and the appearance of new business opportunities

Sustainability of systems interoperability in dynamic business networks

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresCollaborative networked environments emerged with the spread of the internet, contributing to overcome past communication barriers, and identifying interoperability as an essential property to support businesses development. When achieved seamlessly, efficiency is increased in the entire product life cycle support. However, due to the different sources of knowledge, models and semantics, enterprise organisations are experiencing difficulties exchanging critical information, even when they operate in the same business environments. To solve this issue, most of them try to attain interoperability by establishing peer-to-peer mappings with different business partners, or use neutral data and product standards as the core for information sharing, in optimized networks. In current industrial practice, the model mappings that regulate enterprise communications are only defined once, and most of them are hardcoded in the information systems. This solution has been effective and sufficient for static environments, where enterprise and product models are valid for decades. However, more and more enterprise systems are becoming dynamic, adapting and looking forward to meet further requirements; a trend that is causing new interoperability disturbances and efficiency reduction on existing partnerships. Enterprise Interoperability (EI) is a well established area of applied research, studying these problems, and proposing novel approaches and solutions. This PhD work contributes to that research considering enterprises as complex and adaptive systems, swayed to factors that are making interoperability difficult to sustain over time. The analysis of complexity as a neighbouring scientific domain, in which features of interoperability can be identified and evaluated as a benchmark for developing a new foundation of EI, is here proposed. This approach envisages at drawing concepts from complexity science to analyse dynamic enterprise networks and proposes a framework for sustaining systems interoperability, enabling different organisations to evolve at their own pace, answering the upcoming requirements but minimizing the negative impact these changes can have on their business environment

Hub-and-spoke Interoperability: an out of the skies approach for large-scale data interoperability

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresData Interoperability is a key challenge in large-scale heterogeneous environments. In here, interoperability via standards is not feasible or even possible; then, the classic approach, Point-to-Point (P2P) Interoperability, presents here two key problems: the trouble of non-modifiable systems that inhibit full possible interoperability and the excessive quantity of interoperability resources needed for establishing interoperability. A new approach is required for sustaining interoperability in those environments! Laterally thinking, commercial air transportation environments exhibit similar properties and problems to Data Interoperability environments and therefore face comparable difficulties. Outstanding approaches such as scissor-hub operations and the hub-andspoke paradigm have managed to address those challenges in commercial air transportation environments. Which, looking from data interoperability perspective, raises the idea of Mediated Interoperability and Interoperability Compositions. From there, a novel approach for data interoperability is proposed, the Hub-and-Spoke(H&S) Interoperability, as the hypothesis for addressing data interoperability in largescale environments. The H&S Interoperability approach fully solves the interoperability coverage problem and significantly reduces the number of resources needed for realising interoperability, thus outperforming P2P Interoperability. At the end, it is provided a technological realisation of the H&S approach, as the Plug’n’Interoperate solution, built upon plug-and-play principles applied to data interoperability