On the scientific basis of Enterprise Interoperability

The focus of this paper is to provide a methodological framework to support the exploration of the scientific basis of Enterprise Interoperability (EI). EI is an engineering discipline and, as such, requires a sound scientific foundation. But it is a young discipline for which boundaries and key problems are still under scrutiny. Furthermore, it is based on three more established engineering disciplines and the reciprocal support is also under careful study. Therefore, a simple listing of the most relevant scientific methods that may be useful is not helpful for our purpose. For this reason, the paper proposes a vision based on a Stratified Dependency Graph as a possible method to trace the relevance of the science base elements, and a system of Quality Feature to assess their actual effectiveness. This is just a first proposal, and much work is still ahead of us to achieve a comprehensive, well founded framework.