Section: New Results

Interoperability

Participants : Khalid Benali, Nacer Boudjlida.

In the area of inter enterprise cooperation we are faced to the classical matching problem due to the use of different models by the various cooperating enterprise. Even if this issue is a historical database problem tackled through schema integration approaches, this domain has been renewed in the context of web XML schema integration, or in MDA approaches, or ontology approaches for knowledge representation, or in enterprise modeling.

In the continuation of an initial work on semantic-based and model-based solutions for interoperability, Nacer Boudjlida and Dong Cheng applied and experienced the variety of semantic annotation types (structural, terminological and behavioral)  [66] , [68] in the frame of dynamic web services discovery  [63] , [67] , [68] and for competence management systems [20] .

Integration and model transformation techniques, as well as common ontologies definitions allow discovering and defining semantic correspondences between an enterprise knowledge and its collaborators' one. This allows performing an integration solution or a communication solution between their systems by using specific methods such as model driven engineering ones. This model driven engineering approach is now well accepted for interoperability between enterprises. Our approach for interoperability based on an MDA architecture uses meta models mapping to ensure interoperability of application models  [62] . We define the interoperability between two applications through classification of identified mapping between their respective meta models.

Khalid Benali has contributed to a work for verifying the conformity of a process model  [78] .