Linked Data in Enterprise Information Integration

Data integration in large enterprises is a crucial but at the same time costly, long lasting and challenging problem. While business-critical information is often already gathered in integrated information systems, such as ERP, CRM and SCM systems, the integration of these systems itself as well as the integration with the abundance of other information sources is still a major challenge. In the last decade, the prevalent data integration approaches were primarily based on XML, Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). However, we become increasingly aware that these technologies are not sufficient to ultimately solve data integration challenges in large enterprises. In this article, we argue that classic SOA architectures may be well-suited for transaction processing, however more efficient technologies are available today that can be employed for enterprise data integration. In particular, the use of the Linked Data paradigm for integrating enterprise data appears to be a very promising approach. Similarly, as the data web emerged complementing the document web, data intranets can complement the intranets and SOA landscapes currently found in large enterprises. In this paper, we explore the challenges large enterprises are still facing with regard to data integration. These include, but are not limited to, the development, management and interlinking of enterprise taxonomies, domain databases, wikis and other enterprise information sources. We discuss Linked Data approaches in these areas and present some examples of successful applications of the Linked Data principles in that context.