Integration of industrial information systems: from syntactic to semantic integration approaches

Nowadays, integration of enterprise information systems constitutes a real and growing need for most enterprises, especially for large and dynamic industrial ones. It constitutes the main approach to dealing with heterogeneity that concerns the multiple software applications that make up information systems. This paper constitutes a general survey on integration of industrial information systems, and aims to overview the main approaches that can be used in the context of industrial enterprises either for syntactic or semantic integration issues. In particular, this paper focuses on some semantics-based approaches that promote the use of ontologies, and especially the use of OWL-S service ontology.