Secure Enterprise Interoperability Ontology for Semantic Integration of Business to Business Applications

With the ever growing number of products that are targeted at solving a particular problem, rather than addressing all the requirements, which might otherwise be met with a multipurpose product, that need to be integrated in an enterprise business workflow, it is critical that data is able to easily flow from one application to another, in order to securely integrate a set of enterprise computer applications. Automation in Business to-Business (B2B) Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) scenarios confronts challenges related to the resolution of data heterogeneities, service discovery and process composition that should be integrated under a secure framework. In this paper, we propose the Secure Enterprise Interoperability Ontology (SENIO) that provides a secure, shared, common understanding of data, services and processes within B2B integration scenarios. SENIO is based on security-related ontologies that are designed to describe security properties of web services, which can be specific, by stating the particular standards/protocols supported, or more general, such as the security mechanisms used and the credentials required. The security properties associated with registered web services as well as requests for web services are security requirements and capabilities. Finally, we present the utilization of SENIO in a real-world B2B scenario, which describes a network of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) cooperating with each other in order to provide secure human resource services.