Cases on Semantic Interoperability for Information Systems Integration: Practices and Applications

Today’s information systems are becoming too complex. Managing their complexity has been a theme of interest and considerable contribution from a variety of communities, practitioners and enterprises since the mid eighties. This resulted in information systems that can manage massive amounts of data, complex transactions and serve a multitude of applications across global networks. Nowadays, however, we face a new challenge that undermines information systems’ productivity: heterogeneity. As information systems become more distributed and open to serve the needs of an ever increasing distributed IT environment, heterogeneity, which is naturally inherited in independently constructed information systems, comes across as an obstacle. The crux of the problem with heterogeneity is that it impedes productivity as it makes integration of information systems difficult. Integration of information systems is deemed as a prerequisite for operating in different market segments, geographic regions and across different information systems. The properties of distributiveness, seamless connectivity, and omnipresence of information in a global scale are the norm in today’s business environment and information systems have to support and enable them