Service-centric interoperability model for inter-enterprise applications

Interoperability is a key prerequisite for the automation of electronic business activities across organizational boundaries. Existing approaches use document interchange as the interoperability mechanism for inter-enterprise applications and suffer from limited scalability and flexibility. In this paper we discuss the limitations of the document-centric interoperability model and then contrast it with the service-centric approach. We argue that the emergence of service oriented ~omputing presents an opportunity to significantly Improve the interoperability of electronic business applications by using well-designed standard service interfaces.