Saïd Izza

Integration of industrial information systems: from syntactic to semantic integration approaches

Nowadays, integration of enterprise information systems constitutes a real and growing need for most enterprises, especially for large and dynamic industrial ones. It constitutes the main approach to dealing with heterogeneity that concerns the multiple software applications that make up information systems. This paper constitutes a general survey on integration of industrial information systems, and aims to overview the main approaches that can be used in the context of industrial enterprises either for syntactic or semantic integration issues. In particular, this paper focuses on some semantics-based approaches that promote the use of ontologies, and especially the use of OWL-S service ontology.

An Approach for the Evaluation of the Agility in the Context of Enterprise Interoperability

Today the concept of agility has become popular and is still growing in popularity in the management and technology literatures. How do we really define an agile information system? How do we know if an information system is agile? And how do we evaluate the agility in the context of enterprise information systems? This paper tries to answer some of these questions. It precisely aims to present the concept of agility of information systems and also provides an approach for the evaluation of this agility, namely POIRE approach that evaluates the agility as an amalgamation function that combines the agility measure of five complementary aspects that are Process, Organizational, Informational, Resource and Environmental aspects. Finally, this paper studies the role of interoperability in achieving agility and also the rapprochement of the concept of interoperability with the concept of agility.

Exploiting semantic web services in achieving flexible application integration in the microelectronics field

Nowadays, semantic integration constitutes an important approach to deal with heterogeneity within large and dynamic enterprises. Currently, the existing solutions are mainly based on the use of some standards and also middlewares in order to overcome the integration problem. These solutions generally fail as they do not scale to large number of applications and also fail as they do not provide more flexibility and agility. Here, solutions based on semantic web services are promising and they are being actively researched. The paper outlines the potential role that these technologies can offer in solving some key challenges such as semantic mediation and interoperation. In particular, the paper proposes a flexible approach called ODSOI (Ontology-Driven Service-Oriented Integration) that combines both service-oriented architectures and ontologies and that aims to deal correctly with some application integration issues.

A Framework for Semantic Enterprise Integration

Nowadays, Enterprise Integration (EI) constitutes a real and growing need for most of enterprises, especially for large and dynamic ones. It constitutes the main approach to deal with heterogeneity, and particularly to deal with semantic heterogeneity, which it forms the crucial problem of EI. This last problem is not correctly addressed by today’s EI solutions that focus mainly on the technical and syntactical integration. Addressing the semantic aspect will promote EI by providing it more consistency and flexibility. Some efforts are suggested to solve the semantic problem at different level, but they are still not mature. Here, solutions based on service-oriented architectures and semantic web are promoted as nirvana of the integration problem, and they are being actively researched. The paper will outline the potential role that semantic web technologies can offer in solving some key challenges such as semantic mediation. In particular, the paper will propose a flexible approach called ODSOI (Ontology-Driven Service-Oriented Integration) that aims to extend the state-of-the-art in EI, especially in EAI (Enterprise Application Integration), in order to address the semantic problem.

Clustering-based urbanisation to improve enterprise information systems agility

Enterprises are daily facing pressures to demonstrate their ability to adapt quickly to the unpredictable changes of their dynamic in terms of technology, social, legislative, competitiveness and globalisation. Thus, to ensure its place in this hard context, enterprise must always be agile and must ensure its sustainability by a continuous improvement of its information system (IS). Therefore, the agility of enterprise information systems (EISs) can be considered today as a primary objective of any enterprise. One way of achieving this objective is by the urbanisation of the EIS in the context of continuous improvement to make it a real asset servicing enterprise strategy. This paper investigates the benefits of EISs urbanisation based on clustering techniques as a driver for agility production and/or improvement to help managers and IT management departments to improve continuously the performance of the enterprise and make appropriate decisions in the scope of the enterprise objectives and strategy. This approach is applied to the urbanisation of a tour operator EIS.

An approach to achieve IT agility by combining SOA with ITSM

Today, service-orientation is considered as a compelling technique for developing agile software systems that best align with business. It is also considered as an important approach for information technology (IT) service management, especially for service delivery and support. However, there is still some confusions and misunderstanding between people as sometimes they are referring to information technology service management (ITSM) services and sometimes to service-oriented architecture (SOA) services. So, the combination of both SOA and ITSM approaches arises. This paper deals with this combination and it provides some principles, policies and models that guide and explain the connections that may exist between the two worlds. Specifically, it provides a service model and governance, which cover the multitude necessary activities for specifying and managing how services are defined and supported within large enterprises.

Ontology urbanization for semantic integration: dealing with semantics within large and dynamic enterprises

Nowadays, enterprise application integration (EAI) constitutes a real and growing need for most of enterprises, especially for large and dynamic enterprises of heterogeneous, autonomous and distributed information systems. Actually, the major problem of EAI is the heterogeneity problem, especially the semantic integration one. This latter is not correctly addressed by todays solutions, which focus mainly on technical and syntactical integration. Dealing with the semantic aspect, which certainly promotes EAI by providing it more consistency and robustness, needs some appropriate principles such as the knowledge or ontology urbanization. This latter constitutes the main focus of this paper. It aims to favour the semantic application integration, precisely by providing it more appropriate knowledge structuring that can help any enterprise to correctly capture, structure and master its semantics, which constitutes a big challenge for several enterprises that are in quest of more flexibility and manageability.

DEALING WITH SEMANTIC APPLICATION INTEGRATION WITHIN LARGE AND DYNAMIC ENTERPRISES

Nowadays, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) constitutes a real and growing need for most of enterprises, particularly for large and dynamic ones. Actually, the major problem of EAI is the heterogeneity problem, especially the semantic one. This latter is not correctly addressed by todays integration solutions, which focus mainly on syntactical integration. Dealing with the semantic aspect, which will certainly promote EAI by providing it more consistency and robustness, needs some appropriate principles such as ontology urbanization and mediation. These latter that constitute the main focus of this paper aim to favor the semantic application integration allowing to correctly capture, structure, master and reason upon the semantics, which currently constitutes a big challenge for several enterprises that are in quest of more flexibility and manageability.

Semantic Service Matching in the Context of ODSOI Project

Matching services still constitutes a big challenge for most of enterprises in general and notably for large and dynamic ones. This paper delineates a service similarity approach in the context of ODSOI (Ontology-Driven Service-Oriented Integration) project that concern the intra-enterprise integration issues in the field of manufacturing industry. Our approach is based on an extension of OWL-S service similarity. It proposes a rigorous quantitative ranking method based on some novel semantic similarity degrees. An implementation of this ranking method is provided in the form of a prototype coded on Java platform exploiting some existing APIs mainly Racer OWL API, and OWL-S-API.

An Approach for Service-Oriented Urbanism

This paper delineates a service-oriented approach for structuring an enterprise architecture, called service-oriented urbanism. It extends the traditional information system urbanism and enterprise architectures in order to derive service clusters that structure services in a flexible way. This approach completes the existing service-oriented architecture approaches, in order to best categorizing the services and also to determining possible semantic islands that are necessary to the ontology building process. It suggests a two step approach. First, the similarities between services are measured using existing concepts from information retrieval, here the TF-IDF technique. In a second step, cluster analysis is applied in order to derive the different service-areas and service-districts.