Semantic interoperability in industrial environment

Global competition, rapid development of technology, increased cost pressure, and more aggressive demand from customers have changed the business environment once and for all. Companies are merging, they buy and sell other companies and they network more than ever before. Companies must have readiness for enterprise interoperability that requires both technical and information integration. Most of the enterprises have solved the problem of technical integration, but at the moment, they are still struggling with information integration. This paper discusses how semantic technologies can be used to ease information integration process. In order to really benefit from semantic technologies in integration, there is a need for a process that provides methods and instructions for building such solutions in practice. This paper presents a process which supports developing semantic-based solutions for information integration. The process is tested in one industrial case study that is described in this paper.