Interoperability of enterprise software and applications

Interoperability: the ability of a system or a product to work with other systems or products without special effort from the user is a key issue in manufacturing and industrial enterprise generally. It is fundamental to the production, quickly and at low cost, of goods and services and, at the same time, maintaining levels of quality and customisation. While data exchange and IT applications are vital contributions to successful interoperability, communications and common semantics can be just as important between businesses. Composed of more than 40 papers of international authorship, Interoperability of Enterprise Software and Applications ranges from academic research through case studies to industrial experience of interoperability. Many of the papers have examples and illustrations calculated to deepen understanding and generate new ideas. The INTEROP-ESA’05 conference from which this book is drawn was sponsored by the European Union and the Swiss federal government under the IST research program and was further supported by International Society for Information Processing and the Association for Computing Machinery. A concise reference to the state of the art in software interoperability, Interoperability of Enterprise Software and Applications will be of great value to engineers and computer scientists working in manufacturing and other process industries and to software engineers and electronic and manufacturing engineers working in the academic environment.