Dynamic Data Mediation in Enterprise Application Integration

If we try to increase the level of automation in Business-to-Business Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) scenarios, we confront challenges related to the resolution of data and message heterogeneities – that traditional, syntactic EAI technologies are weak to solve, as they miss the documentation of the semantics related to the interfaces and the data structures of the participating services. In this paper, we propose a semantically-enriched approach for dynamic data mediation in EAI scenarios, based on Ontologies, Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services Technologies. The proposed approach focuses on the resolution of message level heterogeneities between collaborative enterprise services exposed from the participating business systems, facilitating automatic, dynamic data mediation during execution time by providing formal transformations of the input and output messages (of the participating Web Services) to a common reference model, i.e. the Enterprise Interoperability Ontology. Moreover, we present a tool that has been designed and developed to support the user to provide business data-related semantic annotations and XSLT transformations if the input and output message parts of given Web Services exposed from business applications, realizing parts of their functionality. Finally, we demonstrate the utilization of the proposed approach and toll in a realworld EAI scenario, i.e. the Stock Replenishment process, across a franchisorfranchisees collaborative value network.