An ontology of interoperability in inter-enterprise communities

The ability of a system to interoperate with another is a multi-dimensional concern which must be considered simultaneously from different perspectives and covering all the concerns relevant for different stakeholders. In this paper, we present a model of interoperability for service-based inter-enterprise computing environments which is based on the Ontology of Interoperability (OoI) developed under INTEROP-NoE and the Pilarcos framework for federated service communities. We propose a refined version of the OoI, generalizing the originally considered scope of interoperability and adding concepts required to address dynamic aspects in interoperability. The ontology is then specialized to the domain of federated service-based communities and we illustrate with some concrete examples how interoperability problems and solutions in that domain could be related to it.