From building information models to semantic process driven interoperability : the journey continues

The paper is based on the authors' involvement in several EU and UK funded collaborative research projects addressing areas ranging from information and knowledge management, CAD-based decision support environments, ontology development, to advanced service-based infrastructures. The paper advocates the migration from data-centric application integration to ontology-based business process support. The paper provides a synthesis of emerging ICT industry needs related to product data technology and proposes inter-enterprise collaboration architectures and frameworks based on semantic services, underpinned by ontology-based knowledge structures