merous models, methodologies, tools and guidelines
exist that can help an organization, an enterprise, or
more generally a system, to develop interoperability
and improve the way it operates with others. Devel-
oping interoperability requires considerable costs and
efforts. Characterizing and measuring interoperabil-
ity, allows an enterprise to define its needed interop-
erability and to plan the migration path to reach it.
This has become a significant research challenge over
the past few years and maturity models have been de-
veloped in response to this challenge. Numerous ma-
turity models have been developed for different pur-
poses, some of which are dedicated to the interoper-
ability domain. A survey of the most known ones has
revealed that, in most cases, existing maturity mod-
els focus on one single facet of interoperability (data,
technology, conceptual, enterprise modeling, etc.). In
this research work, as we propose to have a general
view of the Enterprise Interoperability (EI) domain,
we will be based on the Maturity Model for Enter-
prise Interoperability (MMEI). MMEI was defined in
(Gu
´
edria et al., 2015) and was used as a main in-
put to the standardization work carried out in CEN
TC 310/WG1 and ISO TC 184 SC5/WG1 to become
later a standard maturity model for enterprise interop-
erability (CEN 11345-2). The particularity of this ma-
turity model is to be defined based on existing models
and to have a systemic view of the enterprise.
In this paper, we propose to use the EDSC princi-
ples to define a conceptual model that integrates con-
cepts from the OoEI meta-model and the MMEI ma-
turity model. This will allow to diagnose interoper-
ability problems and simplify the assessment process
by having the required information. This will in par-
ticular help enterprises in diagnosing interoperability
problems while assessing their ability to interoperate
and to prevent actions to undertake. The remainder of
the paper will be the following: the research context
and some preliminaries that are needed to understand
the main contribution of the paper are presented in
section 2. In section 3, we propose the meta model re-
sulting from the integration of the OoEI and concepts
from the MMEI. Section 4 concludes and perspectives
for future work are then given.
2 RELATED WORK
Generally speaking, interoperability is the ability of
two or more systems or components to exchange in-
formation and to use the information that has been
exchanged (IEEE, 1991). When this ability is not
achieved, interoperability becomes a problem that
must be solved.
Solutions to interoperability problems can be charac-
terized according to interoperability approaches de-
fined in (ISO, 1999). EI problems can be localized
into interoperability barriers and characterized by EI
concerns, as defined in the Framework for Enterprise
Interoperability (FEI). FEI has been initially elabo-
rated in INTEROP NoE (D. et al., 2007) and is now
published as an international standard (ISO 11354 -
1). It defines a classification scheme for interoper-
ability knowledge according to three dimensions:
• Interoperability concerns, defining the content of
interoperation that may take place at various lev-
els of the enterprise (i.e. data, service, process,
business).
• Interoperability barriers, identifying various ob-
stacles to interoperability in three categories: con-
ceptual, technological, and organizational.
• Interoperability approaches, representing the dif-
ferent ways in which barriers can be removed (i.e.
integrated, unified, and federated)
The first two dimensions, interoperability con-
cerns and barriers, constitute the problem space of
enterprise interoperability (EI) (Chen, 2006). In or-
der to avoid such problems, enterprises need to know
their strengths and weaknesses in terms of interoper-
ability in order to undertake corrective actions and be
prepared to potential interoperations. This is the pur-
pose of the interoperability assessment which can be
performed either as part of a continuous improvement
initiative, or as part of an analysis approach.
2.1 Ontology of Enterprise
Interoperability (OoEI)
The first attempt to define the interoperability domain
was made by (Rosener et al., 2004), where a model
for defining interoperability as a heterogeneous prob-
lem induced by a communication problem was pro-
posed. On the basis of these research efforts, the On-
tology of Enterprise Interoperability (OoEI) (Gu
´
edria
and Naudet, 2014) as an extension of the Ontology of
Interoperability (OoI) (Naudet et al., 2006) was devel-
oped using the Ontology Web Language (OWL). The
OoEI aims at formally defining Enterprise Interoper-
ability (EI) while providing a framework to describe
problems and related solutions pertaining to the inter-
operability domain.
Interoperability exists because there are at least
two Systems and a Relation between them. The re-
lation is of primary importance and is the source of
interoperability problems (Rosener et al., 2005). A
System is defined as a set of interconnected parts, hav-
ing a Structure, a Function, an Objective and a Behav-