Will SML Technologies and Web Services Solve the Interoperability Problem ?
Ronald A. WEBER, Professor, Peter Green and Michael Rosemann, University of Queensland, Bribane, Australia

Ron WEBER undertakes research and teaching in the information systems area. In 2000 he was awarded the prestigious Prime Minister's Award for Individual University Teacher of the Year, as well as the national award for University Teacher in Economics, Business and Related Studies. Professor WEBER currently has three major areas of research interest. First, he is concerned with building formal models of information systems. The purpose of this research is to enable better analysis and design of information systems. Second, he is concerned with control and audit of computer systems. In particular, he has been examining the impact of new technology on the controls used in information systems and the audit procedures used to evaluate the reliability of these controls. Third, he has been concerned with building theories to account for information systems planning practices. The purpose of these theories is to allow a better understanding of why we observe diverse information systems planning practices.

rweber@commerce.ug.edu.au

Abstract

Achieving interoperability between information systems has become a compelling goal. The reasons are twofold. First, increasingly information systems users have become nomadic. They move between computing environments and expect that they can operate seamlessly across these environments. Second, information systems users are seeking to employ computing resources that have been developed by others. For instance, in a Web services environment, they might wish to outsource particular types of computing activities to providers who have the best software and highest levels of expertise associated with the activities. To achieve interoperability, however, the meanings that underlie texts (or, more generally, the symbols used) must be made explicit so they can be processed by different computing platforms. In this regard, in the context of electronic publishing and the World Wide Web, an initial step was the development of XML to allow definition of customized tagging schemes that give some indication of the meaning of text. Subsequently, languages like RDF have been developed to enable more meaning about a text to be defined. Recently, Web ontology languages like OWL have been proposed to enable still more meaning about a text to be defined. Can the goal of interoperability ever by achieved? Clearly, some basic level of interoperability among systems is possible (it has been achieved already!). Achieving higher levels of interoperability, however, requires that four fundamental problems be solved. First, agreement must be obtained on a general ontology-an ontology that can be used to describe any type of phenomena that occurs in the world. Such an ontology delineates the set of constructs and relationships among them that a grammar like OWL must provide. Second, agreement must be obtained on the phenomena contained within a domain and the meaning of these phenomena. Third, agreement must be obtained on how the different types of phenomena in a domain map to the constructs provided in the general ontology-for instance, what phenomena in the domain constitute things, what constitute properties, what constitute events, and so on. Fourth, some means of replicating in machines the contructivist processes that humans use to ascribe meaning to phenomena must be devised.