Extended Hypermodel for Interoperability within the Virtual Enterprise

Within the current economic context, enterprises are facing new interoperability issues due to increasing need of e Business Collaboration within the emerging digital ecosystems in which they belong. They also need to be able to keep in pace with their heterogeneous internal legacy systems, and can\´t change their infrastructure or applications for fast and short collaboration implying information and knowledge interchange. Current solutions are less and less adapted to face increasing needs and complexity. As proposing a new disruptive approach and technologies is inappropriate, the approach proposed by this paper is to build frameworks based on federation of existing eBusiness standards used by a given ecosystem, and allowing achieving "pragmatic" interoperability. This approach combines the advantage of using simultaneously Model Driven Engineering, Enterprise Modeling, Service Oriented Architecture and commodities on the WEB based on open and governed information and communication standards. It implies on facing important issues related to semantic preservation all along the lifecycle of the artifacts and infrastructures required to define and exploit an application. Such a need is addressed by the development of Extended Hypermodel concept, which is also introduced within this paper.