Semantic Mediation for Standard-Based B2B Interoperability

A semantic-mediation architecture advances traditional approaches for standard-based business-to-business interoperability. The architecture formally models a business domain in a reference ontology and annotates domain message schemas to define public and proprietary reconciliation rule sets. Enterprises can use the rule sets to implement standard-based message interfaces and to translate message content between their proprietary message forms. An implementation of the semantic-mediation architecture augments a general applications-integration toolset developed for the Athena European FP 6 project. The implementation demonstrates the architecture's feasibility and suggests directions for future tool enhancements.