ABSTRACT
With the rapid development of global economic cooperation, now more than ever, enterprises are collaborating with each other to increase opportunities. A major issue in enterprise collaboration and cooperation is the development of the capability of interoperation, that is, interoperability, as a component in an enterprise’s collaboration infrastructure. Having enterprise interoperability can improve the efficiency of the cooperation, which is a key to enhancing the competitiveness of enterprises. The success of interenterprise collaborations relies on an infrastructure that takes care of issues such as collaboration coordination, trust management,
and interoperability. Enterprise interoperation is one of the main characteristics of the collaborations among enterprises. Enterprise interoperation relates to both enterprise collaboration and enterprise interactions. Enterprise collaboration places emphasis on how enterprises cooperate to realize collaboration, and enterprise interaction focuses on how heterogeneous enterprise systems from different enterprises are capable of interacting with each other. “Enterprise interoperability” is defined as interoperation among two or more enterprises across organizational boundaries. “Interoperability” is the ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged (IEEE, 1990). Enterprise interoperability is also defined as the ability to communicate with peer systems and access the functionality of the peer systems (Vernadat, 1996). In addition to relating two or more systems together, the establishment of interoperability also implies the removal of incompatibilities between the systems. According to ISO 14258 and to some researchers’ points of view, there are three ways to develop interoperability (Panetto and Cecil, 2013): (1) “integrated,” if there is a standard format for all constituent systems. Diverse models will be interpreted according to the standard format; (2) “unified,” if there is a common meta-level structure across constituent models, providing a means for establishing semantic equivalence; and (3) “federated,” if models are dynamically accommodated rather than having a predetermined meta-model. The concept of mapping is applied at the ontological level, that is, the semantic level.
