The word integration has been used with different meanings in the ontology field. This article aims at clarifying the meaning of the word "integration" and presenting some of the relevant work done in integration. We identify three meanings of ontology "integration": when building a new ontology reusing (by assembling, extending, specializing or adapting) other ontologies already available; when building an ontology by merging several ontologies into a single one that unifies all of them; when building an application using one or more ontologies. We discuss the different meanings of "integration", identify the main characteristics of the three different processes and propose three words to distinguish among those meanings: integration, merge and use.

Domain engineering aims to support systematic reuse, focusing on modeling common knowledge in a problem domain. Ontologies have also been pointed as holding great promise for software reuse. In this paper, we present ODE (Ontology-based Domain Engineering), an ontological approach for domain engineering that aims to join ontologies and object-oriented technology.

Current eCommerce is still mainly characterized by the relatively straightforward trading of commodity goods. Nextgeneration efforts in worldwide information infrastructure, especially the Semantic Web and Web Services, contribute some necessary, but not sufficient, steps on the way to much more advanced business scenarios, such as collaborative design over the Internet of sophisticated goods and services. This paper discusses additional steps needed to achieve collaborative eCommerce concerned with real-world services. First, a component-based description of services and what they contain is needed, such that electronic design and production of services can be simplified to a configuration task: ‘serviguration’. Second, a configurable service approach must be linked with a clear conception of customer value over the Internet, such that it is ultimately expressable in computational terms. We discuss associated requirements and generic components, in the form of a service ontology needed to achieve online configurability of real-world services in a Semantic Web environment.

Many innovative e-business ideas are hardly understood by their stakeholders when articulated just by words. To create a better, also shared, understanding, and to enhance confidence in the feasibility of such verbal ideas, we have developed a model-based e-business development approach called e³-value . But does a model-based approach really contribute to the development of innovative e-business ideas? To answer this question, we report on an innovative e-business idea about online news provisioning which has been explored using our e³-value approach, and which has been implemented afterwards. To see the merits of e³-value we revisited this project one-year-and-a-half after its implementation. It then shows up that indeed a modeling approach contributes to e-business development, but also some important lessons can be learned to improve our methodology.

Current eCommerce is still mainly characterized by the trading of commodity goods. Many industries o#er complex compositions of goods based on customers' specifications. This is facilitated by a component-based description of goods, supported by a variety of product classification schemes, e.g., UNSPSC and eCl@ss. These focus on physical goods -- wrongly referred to as products -- rather than on services. Services are

Although ontology reuse is an important research issue only one of its subprocesses (merge) is fairly well understood. The time has come to change the current state of affairs with the other reuse subprocess: integration. In this paper we characterize the ontology integration process, we identify the activities that should be performed in this process and describe a methodology to perform the ontology integration process.

Mobile devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones are in widespread use already today and converging to mobile smart phones. They enable the users to access a wide range of services and information without guiding them through their actual demands. Especially during mass events like the Olympic Games 2008 in Beijing- which was initially the context of our work- a large service space is expected to support all mobile visitors, being athletes, journalists, or spectators. Current approaches tackling such problems are location-based (i.e., location-based services), meaning that a user’s location is taken into consideration for service provision, and even contextaware, meaning that beyond location other characteristics of a user’s environment are taken into account. Such information obviously helps to deliver relevant information at the right time to the mobile users. Going one step further, a situation-aware system abstracts from the context dimensions by translating specific contexts into logical situations (such as being in the car, in a stadium). Even though many context frameworks have been introduced in the past few years, what is usually missing is the notion of characteristic features of contexts which are invariant during certain time intervals. We refer to such features as situations. Knowing the situation end users are in allows the system to better target the information to be delivered to them. This paper presents the main concepts developed for a platform named FLAME2008, which is able to support its mobile users with personalized situation-aware services in push and pull mode. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.4 [Systems and Software]: Current awareness systems (selective dissemination of information--SDI), user profiles and alert services.

Abstract. The lack of a good understanding of customer needs within eservice initiatives caused severe financial losses in the Norwegian energy sector, resulting in the failure of e-service initiatives offering packages of independent services. One of the causes was a poor elicitation and understanding of the e-services at hand. In this paper, we propose an ontologically founded approach (1) to describe customer needs, and the necessary e-services that satisfy such needs, and (2) to bundle elementary e-services into needs-satisfying e-service bundles. The ontology as well as the associated reasoning mechanisms are codified in RDFS to enable software support for need elicitation and service bundling. A case study from the Norwegian energy sector is used to demonstrate how we put our theory into practice.

Business models have been an important topic in various disciplines and particularly e-business. Yet, little research has tempted to compare and integrate the different business model approaches. This paper compares two business model ontologies, the Business Model Ontology BMO and the e 3 value ontology, for the design of business models and value constellations. For that purpose it introduces a framework that allows the comparison of different conceptual approaches to business models. The two ontologies are illustrated through a case study in the domain of rights music management. The outcome of the analysis is twofold. Firstly, it permits a better understanding of business model research. Secondly, it highlights the possible paths to integrate the two ontologies in order to improve the representation, design, and analysis of business models. 1

The contributions of this thesis bridge two disciplines: environmental science (specifically, wastewater management) and computer science (specifically, artificial intelligence). Wastewater management as a discipline operates using a range of different approaches and methods which include: manual control, on-line automatic control, numerical or non-numerical models, statistical models and simulation models. The thesis characterizes an interdisciplinary research on artificial intelligence techniques (rule-based reasoning, case-based reasoning, ontologies and planning) applied to environmental decision-support systems. The integrated architecture's design of this application, the OntoWEDSS system, augments classic reasoning systems (rule-based reasoning and case-based reasoning) with a domain ontology about the management of wastewater treatment plants. The integration of the newly created WaWO ontology provides a more flexible management capability to OntoWEDSS. The construction of the OntoWEDSS decision support system is based on a specific case study but the system is also of general interest, given that its ontologyunderpinned architecture can be applied to any wastewater treatment plant and, at an appropriate level of abstraction, to other environmental domains. The OntoWEDSS system improves the diagnosis of the state of a treatment plant, provides support for wastewater-related complex problem-solving, and facilitates knowledge modelling and reuse by means of the WaWO ontology.