Ontology alignment for IT integration in business domains

Abstract

Development of ICT offers new solutions facilitating appearance of flexible supply networks. Business and IT alignment in flexible supply networks requires integration of different IT systems, what, in turn, assumes semantic integration of their data and workflow models. Ontologies have shown their usability for this type of tasks. Integration of different enterprise aspects into an ontology has been also researched in a number of works. In the proposed approach an ontological model is used to solve the problem of heterogeneity. This model makes it possible to enable interoperability between heterogeneous information systems due to provision of their common semantics. The paper focuses on description of the ontology-based knowledge fusion and ontology alignment patterns aimed at facilitation of the IT integration processes. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.