Concept Integration Precedes Enterprise Integration

The integration of enterprises in a vertical market is not solved but rather facilitated by information technology. One aspect is the coupling of heterogeneous information systems from the participating enterprises. However, be-fore this integration can be tackled, the enterprises have to create a common set of concepts to discuss their cooper-ation. We call this the inter-organizational concept base and present a proposal on how to structure such a concept base and how to co-develop it by participants from various enterprises. Product ontologies are bundled into reference models for certain industry sectors and serve as a starting point for the discussion about concepts. The second in-gredient are explicit representations of norms that describe who is supposed to participate in which part of the discus-sion process. The end result, the inter-organizational con-cept base, is the input for an inter-organizational workflow modeling to specify precisely the enterprise integration.