Ontologies and Data Mappings:

Semantic service specifications are required

that are based on domain ontologies.
Domain ontologies can be considered to be data

models that all process
participants have agreed upon. Ontologies in

computer science are characterized
as data models that represent a set of

concepts within a domain and the
relationships between those concepts.
A domain ontology is always associated with a

set of stakeholders, who
need to agree on the domain ontology. An

ontology has been described in
Gruber (1993) as an explicit specification of

a conceptualization The domain ontology shown

can be used to integrate services provided
by software systems. In an enterprise

application integration scenario, typical
systems to integrate are customer relationship

management systems, or CRM
systems, and enterprise resource planning

systems, or ERP systems. For instance,
the full name data field of the customer

relationship management system is
mapped to the Name concept in the domain

ontology. Since the street address
is stored in two fields of the enterprise

resource planning system data structure,
the field Strasse is mapped to StName, and

Hausnummer is mapped to
the Number concept of the ontology.
If the data fields of the application systems

are mapped to the domain
ontology, then a mapping of the data can be

achieved automatically at run
time. Assume that there is a service of the

customer relationship management
system that returns a parameter of data type

Cust 234. This data can be fed
into a service that takes a parameter of data

type Adr32 if the appropriate
data mapping is performed.If there is a domain

ontology in place and the data structures of

the systems
are mapped to the domain ontology, then this

data mapping can be
performed automatically.