Enhanced knowledge management of an Interoperability Service Utility

Today, enterprises to be efficient and competitive within their business environments should seamlessly adapt, collaborate and interoperate with each other. However, the diversity in the way they organize their knowledge through ontologies, brings about the crucial need for establishing semantic interoperability between all communicating parties. One approach to solve this problem is the use of MENTOR, a particular methodology based on the development of a common, top-level “reference ontology” that serves as an intermediary in the communications between the various enterprises, harmonizing not semantically coincident ontologies that represent the same segment of reality. This methodology allows the enterprises to keep their own ontologies and semantics unchanged internally, enhancing thus semantic interoperability between them with low intra-enterprises changes, cost and effort. This paper proposes the integration of MENTOR methodology within an Interoperability Service Utility (ISU), i.e. an intelligent system that serves as a utility software component to promote interoperability among communicating enterprises. The present work describes design and implementation specifications of such an infrastructure and explains how MENTOR methodology will enable the proposed ISU to seamlessly provide the necessary set of e-services that will deliver and sustain interoperability across its enterprise users.