Towards business ontologies matching for inter-enterprise collaboration platform in a lean manufacturing strategy

Abstract

The Lean Manufacturing strategy aims at developing the enterprise value chain concept. The Lean makes extensive use of new organizational strategies such as business refocusing and development strategies for inter-enterprise collaboration. These reorganizations involve agility to deal with structural changes supported by communication technologies. However, the multiplicity of enterprise IT leads to complicate the inter-enterprise collaboration. However, the Services-Oriented Architecture provides flexibility and openness to enterprise Information System thanks to the "service" notion but fails to deal with business semantic mediation between partners involved in the collaboration. To meet these issues, this paper focuses on a semantic Enterprise Services Bus (ESB) which is a Service-Oriented Architecture middleware to define a business ontology-based matching and provide business and technological alignment to homogenize the information exchanged in the whole collaboration network. This paper also focuses on the technical implementation of the semantic ESB. © 2010 IFIP.