Technical, semantic and organizational issues of enterprise interoperability and networking

Enterprise networking refers to any kind of organization structures in which two or more geographically dispersed business entities need to work in interaction. This can happen within a single distributed enterprise (networked enterprise) or among several enterprises (network of enterprises), including the extended enterprise or virtual organizations. This concerns any kind of organizations, e.g. industrial firms, public organizations or large government agencies. Enterprise interoperability is a sine qua non-condition for enterprise integration and networking. It largely relies on information and communication technologies (ICT), especially Internet computing. The paper uses the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) as a foundational baseline to first discuss technical, semantic and organizational aspects of enterprise interoperability and networking and finally to address some open research issues.