Semantic-based case retrieval of service integration models in extensible enterprise systems based on a business domain ontology

Abstract

In spite of the advances in Service-Oriented Computing (SOC), the extension of standard enterprise systems with complementary services provided by third-party vendors still requires deep expert knowledge. However, valuable integration experience from similar problems already solved in the past is not systematically leveraged which leads to high integration costs. We tackle this problem by exploring Case-Based Reasoning techniques in this novel application context. A key challenge for the reuse of integration knowledge is to retrieve existing integration cases that have been developed in similar functional areas within the process space of standard enterprise systems. In this paper we present a Business Domain Ontology that provides a formal representation of reference processes in the domain of standard enterprise systems. In addition a case retrieval algorithm is proposed, that computes the similarity between two integration cases based on the semantic distance between concepts within the Business Domain Ontology. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.