The METON-Architecture

Common user- and business requirements demand the combined use of the multitude of available information resources as well as seamless cooperation in terms of aligned (business) processes. In the work at hand an innovative approach is developed that enables integration and interoperability of arbitrary resources or process steps based on a matching of their model representations. To achieve this goal the concepts of metamodels and ontologies are combined in a generic architecture that is referred to as METON. This architecture ensures the identification of equivalent or similar resources and activities not only on a syntactic but also on a semantic level. The practical applicability of the developed approach is proved in the area of business process management. Here it is demonstrated that METON is able to identify semantic relationships between business processes despite existing heterogeneities in terms of different modeling languages (e.g. BPMN, EPC) or different domain semantics. Furthermore it is shown that these semantic relationships can be used in a series of applications such as the establishment of interoperability between different organizations along the value chain.