Semantic interoperability for automated enterprises

Collaboration between enterprises has been an important challenge in current enterprise computing environment. There have been a number of attempts on sharing relevant information among the enterprises. As a simple example, electronic data interchange (EDI) systems (Iacovou, Benbasat, and Dexter 1995) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems (Braganza 2002) are simple standardisation-based methods for transferring data between different enterprises. However, with various information communication technologies, we have been facing with two major problems on supporting collaborations in a new enterprise computing environments, as follows.