|
NEW : Due to the late submission of chapters the editors have revised the book’s calendar. Please check the Procedure page.
Motivation The goal of Enterprise Applications Integration (EAI) is to integrate and streamline heterogeneous business processes across different applications and business units, and to facilitate employees, decision makers and business partners to readily access corporate and customer data no matter where it resides. This business process fusion requires the transformation of business activities that could be achieved by the integration of the interfaces of previously autonomous business processes by pipelining different middleware technologies and enabling the effective (semi-automated) exchange of information between various systems within a company or across enterprises. Although current EAI trends and technologies, like Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), and Web Services technologies, are quite mature, if we try to increase the level of automation in integration scenarios, we confront several problems and challenges, such as a) data and message level heterogeneities between interoperating services, b) insufficient search and discovery of published Web Services in a common registry, and c) inadequate Web Process composition with regard to the desired functionality and the operational requirements. The problem that still exists, which the traditional, syntactic EAI technologies are weak to solve, refers to the formalization and the documentation of the semantics related to the interfaces and the data structures of the deployed Web Services. This lack of formal semantics of applications and services to be integrated makes it difficult for software engineers and developers to interconnect heterogeneous applications and thus creates obstacles in the automating EAI activities. There is no doubt that these needs impose the use and interpretation of semantics in EAI and that semantically enriched approaches will hopefully mitigate these problems. Overall objective of the book This book aims at providing the latest research findings such as theoretical foundations, principles, methodologies, architectures, technical frameworks and case studies for the design and development of Semantic Enterprise Application Integration based on Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services Technologies, Service-Oriented Architectures and Collaborative Business Processes. Target Audience The principal audience will consist of scholars and researchers in the fields of EAI, semantic web technologies, interoperability and semantic integration. The book aims to provide “food for thought” for future research. However, it also aims to address the needs of practitioners working on complex supply-chain environments, who may find within the book the foundations for new ideas in the EAI field. Graduate and post-graduate students would also find this book to be a useful reference resource.
|
|
Semantic Enterprise Application Integration |
