Pragmatic interoperability in the enterprise : a research agenda

Eective collaboration among today's enterprises is indispensable. Such collaborative synergy is important to foster the creation of innovative value-added products and services that would have otherwise been dicult to achieve if enterprises work in isolation. However, it is a widely held belief that interoperability problems have been one of the perennial hurdles in achieving such collaboration. This research aims to improve the current state of the art in enterprise interoperability research by zeroing in on the notion of pragmatic interoperability(PI). When enterprise systems collaborate by exchanging information, PI goes beyond the compatibility between the structure and the meaning of shared information, it further ensures that the intended eect of the message exchange is realized. This paper outlines our research agenda to address the analysis, design, development and evaluation of a pragmatically interoperable solution for enterprise collaboration

Towards a flexible service integration through separation of business rules

Driven by dynamic market demands, enterprises are continuously exploring collaborations with others to add value to their services and seize new market opportunities. Achieving enterprise collaboration is facilitated by Enterprise Application Integration and Business-to-Business approaches that employ architectural paradigms like Service Oriented Architecture and incorporate technological advancements in networking and computing. However, flexibility remains a major challenge related to enterprise collaboration. How can changes in demands and opportunities be reflected in collaboration solutions with minimum time and effort and with maximum reuse of existing applications? This paper proposes an approach towards a more flexible integration of enterprise applications in the context of service mediation. We achieve this by combining goal-based, model-driven and serviceoriented approaches. In particular, we pay special attention to the separation of business rules from the business process of the integration solution. Specifying the requirements as goal models, we separate those parts which are more likely to evolve over time in terms of business rules. These business rules are then made executable by exposing them as Web services and incorporating them into the design of the business process.\ud Thus, should the business rules change, the business process remains unaffected. Finally, this paper also provides an evaluation of the flexibility of our solution in relation to the current work in business process flexibility research

Combining goal-oriented and model-driven approaches to solve the Payment Problem Scenario

Motivated by the objective to provide an improved participation of business domain experts in the design of service-oriented integration solutions, we extend our previous work on using the COSMO methodology for service mediation by introducing a goal-oriented approach to requirements engineering. With this approach, business requirements including the motivations behind the mediation solution are better understood, specified, and aligned with their technical implementations. We use the Payment Problem Scenario of the SWS Challenge to illustrate the extension

Towards Pragmatic Interoperability in the New Enterprise - A Survey of Approaches

Pragmatic interoperability (PI) is the compatibility between the intended versus the actual effect of message exchange. This paper advances PI as a new research agenda within the gamut of enterprise interoperability research. PI is timely in today’s new enterprises as it is increasingly important that organizations are able to collectively add value to their products and services through effective collaboration. When enterprise systems exchange information, PI goes beyond the compatibility between the structure and the meaning of shared information. It also considers the use of information in a given context as an equally important aspect. As PI is a relatively new domain, this paper attempts to elucidate its notion by identifying and relating its key concepts from proposed definitions, and by reviewing extant approaches to identify critical knowledge gaps in PI research

The COSMO solution to the SWS challenge mediation problem scenarios: an evaluation

During the course of our participation in the Semantic Web Services (SWS) Challenge, we have shown how the concepts defined in the COnceptual Services MOdeling (COSMO) framework for the modeling, reasoning and analysis of services can be used to solve the Mediation Problem Scenarios of the Challenge. Along with the service-oriented refinement and composition paradigm of COSMO, our approach is also based on model-driven and goal-oriented principles where the semantic integration of applications is designed at a layer of abstraction higher than technology specifications. The objective of this paper is to evaluate our previous and current research efforts towards advancing our solution to the semantic integration of service-oriented applications, particularly, using the mediation problem scenarios of the Challenge. We do this by presenting the state of the art of our solution while reporting our experience with applying our solution to the scenarios including lessons learned and identified research challenges

A Simple Solution for Information Sharing in Hybrid Web Service Composition

In hybrid service composition approaches, processes are used to describe the core part of the composition logic whereas the rules are used to specify decision making constraints and conditions. These rules are exposed as services and are used in the processes whenever a certain decision has to be made. To evaluate these rules, we need a mechanism 1) to share data between the main process and the rule service; 2) to decide upon which service to invoke based on the result received from the rule service. In this paper, we propose a tuple space based solution for supporting these requirements. We also include descriptions of an application scenario to motivate our work, a prototype of the proposed solution and we demonstrate how our solution helps in achieving process flexibility with minimal maintenance costs in the context of changing requirements