Interoperability: the ability of a system or a product to work with other systems or products without special effort from the user is a key issue in manufacturing and industrial enterprise generally. It is fundamental to the production of goods and services quickly and at low cost at the same time as maintaining levels of quality and customisation. While data exchange and IT applications are vital contributions to successful interoperability, communications and common semantics can be just as important between businesses. Composed of more than 40 papers of international authorship, Interoperability of Enterprise Software and Applications ranges from academic research through case studies to industrial experience of interoperability. Many of the papers have examples and illustrations calculated to deepen understanding and generate new ideas. The INTEROP-ESAa??05 conference from which this book is drawn was sponsored by the European Union and the Swiss federal government under the IST research program and was further supported by International Society for Information Processing and the Association for Computing Machinery. A concise reference to the state of the art in software interoperability, Interoperability of Enterprise Software and Applications will be of great value to engineers and computer scientists working in manufacturing and other process industries and to software engineers and electronic and manufacturing engineers working in the academic environment.

Prof. Konstantas is the originator of the Object-oriented Interoperability concept, which placed the basis for the definition of interoperability issues between heterogenous Object Oriented systems and applications. He defined and implemented an inter-language interoperability support framework and proposed different services for object oriented interoperability support. He also worked in the design of applications with object oriented and agent systems, ranging from multimedia to medical applications, where the problems and issues related to interoperability were identified and different solutionswere opted. Today Prof. Konstantas works in the implementation of mobile health systems and services and is interested in the interoperability problems between divers information systems and services.Prof. Bourri+¿res, works in the models and methods for the use of production systems in modern manufacturing industries. In this context he is interested in the issues and problems related to the software and application life cycle management,where interoperability with new and emerging systems is of major importance. One of the objectives is the creation of unified model where the different issues coming from all levels of an industial system (machine level, management of the production site, multi-site management etc) and aggregation of the related information can be represented. The target being to allow the exchange of information and smooth operation at all levels of the IS. Prof. L+¬onard is working in the development of Information Systems and the problems arrising from the interoperability of diverse (legacy) Information Systems. inthis direction he has developed M7, an evolutionary approach for Information System design, offering an environment of specification in a common formalism and capitalizes the various specifications in order to make them reusable. He also works in the Specification and implementation of highly configurable coordination information systems with responsibility overlaping protocols on Workflow Information systems.Nacer Boudjlida  is a full professor  at the University Henri   Poincar+¬ Nancy 1 (F) and a researcher at LORIA (Lorraine  Laboratory of Research  in Computer   Science and Applications). As a  professor, his lectures include   the various   facets  of   databases (DBMS, database design, distribution, architecture, administration and  so on).  As a  researcher, his domain  of interest includes process modelling and support,  distributed and cooperative computing, semantic-based mediated architectures.  He  authored two books on databases and numerous papers on  software systems integration and  interoperability, on software  process modelling and support, etc.