Ontology-Based Service-Oriented Architecture For Enterprise Application Integration

With the decades of the investment on the information technologies, enterprises have been continued building their business applications with different platform and different data sources. The need to integrate existing applications together with heterogeneous data sources to build a complete business process work flow is becoming a key requirement for enterprise. For this purpose, EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) appears to address the issues by enabling data propagation and business process execution throughout the numerous distinct networked applications as if it would be a unique global application.Web service allows applications to communicate with each other in a platform- and programming language-independent manner. It provides interfaces that can be accessed over the network through standardized XML messaging. Thus, Web Service is very promising in solving the integration problem. Even if Web Service is promising, they do not correctly address the semantic aspect that is the essential drawback of today's EAI technologies.Ontology defines structure of classes and the relationships between classes and it can serve as a thesaurus or rich dictionary, linking data structures - whatever their source or format - by means of a common model. This shared understanding is a very powerful concept that enables a formal description of semantics - the meaning of the data. Now there are many general works which use ontology-based approaches when solving data integration.By combining Web Service and Ontology technology together, we approach an ontology-based service-oriented architecture for the enterprise application Integration. In this approach ontology is used as the standard data module, which provides the global vocabulary across the enterprise. Web Service is the architecture for application integration. This architecture is transcending to the approach to drive the integration process and resolve the semantic conflicts during the process.