COLLABORATION ACROSS THE ENTERPRISE An Ontology-Based Approach for Enterprise Interoperability Aggelos Liapis, Stijn Christiaens, Pieter De Leenheer Semantics Technology & Applications Research Lab (STARLab) Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 BRUSSEL 5, Belgium {liapis.aggelos,stijn.christiaens,pieter.de.leenheer}@vub.ac.be Keywords: CSCW, collaborative environments, ontology, enterprise interoperability, legacy systems. Abstract: In the current competitive industrial context, enterprises must react swiftly to market changes. In order to face this problem, enterprises must increase their collaborative activities. This implies at one hand high communication between their information systems and at the other hand the compatibility of their practices. An important amount of work must be performed towards proper practices of standardization and harmonization. This is the concept of Interoperability. Interoperability of enterprises is a strategic issue, caused as well as enabled by the continuously growing ability of integration of new legacy and evolving systems, in particular in the context of networked organisations. of the reconciliation of the communicated business semantics is crucial to success. For this, non-disruptive re-use of existing business data stored in “legacy” production information systems is an evident prerequisite. In addition the integration of a methodology as well as the scalability of any proposed semantic technological solution are equally evident prerequisites. Yet on all accounts current semantic technologies as researched and developed for the so- called Semantic Web may be found lacking. Still, semantic technology is claimed about to become mainstream, as it is pused by enterprise interoperation needs and increasing availability of domain specific content (for example ontologies) rather than pulled by basic technology (for example OWL) providers. In this paper we present a methodology which has resulted in the implementation of a highly customizable collaborative environment focussed to support ontology-based enterprise interoperability. The main benefit of this environment is its ability to integrate with legacy systems, rescuing enterprises from having to adapt or upgrade their existing systems in order to interoperate with their partners. 1. INTRODUCTION Collaboration and knowledge sharing have become crucial to enterprise success in the knowledge- intensive European Community and the globalised market world-wide. In this market the trend in innovation of products and services is shifting from mere production excellence to intensive, collaborative and meaningful interoperability (De Leenheer and Meersman, 2007). The main objective of this paper is to illustrate the features and the underpinning technology of a collaboration platform designed to support the effective interoperability within and between very large enterprises. A main key issue that this platform addresses is the variety and number of different resources that concur to achieve a cross-enterprise business service. A second key issue it addresses is the diversity of agreed (e.g. meaning negotiation when creating online contracts) models, and the difficulty in adapting its integrated features and services to different situations. These problems are addressed with a flexible solution, avoiding rigidity that occurs in the implementation and maintenance of existing cooperation platforms and their integration with an advanced semantic repository. The proposed platform operates at two levels: at the front end, it enables the end users to access seamless collaborative (e.g., synchronous, asynchronous and semi-synchronous) as well as individual mode tools and services to extract valuable information; at the back end, it uses a sophisticated ontology framework to support and record the collaborative work,