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 today´s 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.