The ATHENA Interoperability Framework

Abstract

Systems interoperability is a growing interest area, because of the continuously growing need of integration of new, legacy and evolving systems, in particular in the context of networked businesses and eGovernment. Enterprises today face many challenges related to lack of interoperability. Enterprise applications andsoftware systems need to be interoperable in order to achieve seamless business across organisational boundaries and thus realise virtual networked organisations.IEEE defines interoperability as “the ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged” [1]. Interoperability should not only be considered a property of ICT systems, but also concerns the business processes and the business context of an enterprise. Therefore, interoperations are only meaningful, when all levels of an enterprise are addressed. The diversity, heterogeneity, and autonomy of software components, application solutions, business processes, and the business context ofan enterprise must be considered.We believe that there is a need for a framework that takes a more comprehensive approach to interoperability. In this paper we present results from the ATHENA Integrated Project [2] in defining the ATHENA Interoperability Framework (AIF) [3] for enterprise applications and software systems. The framework adopts a holistic perspective on interoperability in order to analyse and understand the business needs and the technical requirements, and a multidisciplinary and model-driven solution approach to solving theinteroperability problems.The paper is structured as follows: In section 2 we provide some background information and our research method. In section 3 we present the specification of the interoperability framework. Section 4 discusses the usage of the framework interms of interoperability profiles. Conclusions and future work are presented in section 5.