Formal fact-oriented model transformations for cooperative information systems semantic conceptualisation

Abstract

Information in enterprise is, now more than ever, a fundamental resource. In order to increase enterprise performance, economics paradigms focus on how to better manage it. Information Systems (IS) are systems whose activities are devoted to capture and to store data, to process them and produce knowledge, used by any stakeholders within an enterprise or among different networked enterprises. The modern architecture of information systems is based on distributed networks. An important challenge, to reach higher performance, is to represent and share knowledge managed by those ISs. One of the main issues in making such heterogeneous Cooperative Information Systems (CIS) working together is to remove semantics interoperability barriers. This paper firstly analyses interoperability issues between CISs and then proposes a systematic approach for data models conceptualisation for knowledge explicitation, based on initial conceptual model cleaning rules, expert knowledge injection rules and finally fact-oriented transformation rules. A case study is proposed, related to a work order process in an Enterprise Resource Planning application, Sage X3. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.