Developing a Science Base for Enterprise Interoperability

Interoperability is an important characteristic of information systems, organisations, their processes and data. Achieving automated collaboration of processes and systems may lead to a dramatic increase in productivity for enterprises of any size. As a result of this projected benefit, interoperability has been prescribed by numerous standardization frameworks, guidelines at enterprise level, data schemas and techniques to tackle the problem of non-communicating systems or organisations. In parallel, most international software, hardware and service vendors created their own strategies for achieving the goal of open, collaborative, loosely coupled systems and components. This paper goes beyond the presentation of the main milestones in this fascinating quest for collaboration between people, systems and information: it attempts to describe how this new interdisciplinary research area can transform into a vibrant scientific domain, by applying the necessary method and tools. To achieve that, the chapter presents the ingredients of this new domain, proposes its needed formal and systematic tools, explores its relation with neighbouring scientific domains and finally prescribes the next steps for achieving the thrilling goal of laying the foundations of a new science.