What is Semantic Integration?

A Semantic Integration between applications/systems, is an integration using a shared/common Semantic Specification. A Semantic Specification is the specification of the meaning of the information to be exchanged between the applications/systems to integrate. Once the semantic specification is done, the technical schemas of the interface (e.g. format specification, XML schema, database schema, etc.) of the applications/systems will be respecively mapped/linked to the shared/common semantic specification. Then, the direct technical mapping between the technical schemas of two applications/systems should be "generate" using five inputs:

• The shared/common Semantic Specification
• The format specification, or the technical schema, of the 1st application/system
• The format specification, or the technical schema, of the 2nd application/system
• The links (semantic mapping) between the format specification od the 1st system and the shared/common semantic specification
• The links (semantic mapping) between the format specification od the 2nd system and the shared/common semantic specification

With all these ingredients, I imagine that the technical (field-to-field) mapping between the two format specifications (or the technical schemas) can be generated ;-)

The "lambda" process

Before retrying to define what I mean by "Semantic Integration", I think I should before introduce what I called the "lambda" process. Before writing this post, I have made some research info my hard drive, and my oldest document I have found with the drawing below was from April 2002:

Figure 1: The "lambda" process

The idea expressed by this drawing is that no format specification should be exchanged between the teams of the respective applications/systems to integrate. For instance, if you have to integrate a SAP system delivering IDOC with an EDI server reading EDIFACT message, ideally, the SAP team should never see the format speification (MIG or Message Implementation Guidelines) of the EDIFACT, and the EDI team should never see the IDOC format specification!

The only document that can be directly shared, between the teams of the respective applications/systems to integrate, is the semantic specifcation capturing the meaning of the information (i.e. the semantic) to be exchnaged by the two applications/systems.

Once the shared semantic specification is finalised, each team of the respective applications/systems to integrate should give to (and only to) the Middleware Team, its application-specific format specification and the links between this format specification and the semantic specification.