Using neighboring domains towards setting the foundations for Enterprise Interoperability science

Collaborative networked environments emerged with the spread of the internet, contributing to overcome past communication barriers, and identifying interoperability as an essential property. Since then, Enterprise Interoperability (EI) has solidified as a well established area of applied research studying the problems, and proposing novel solutions towards interoperability problems. However, in spite of research efforts to date, the proper scientific foundations for El remain intangible. The paper presents a proposal to analyze neighboring research domains of El and take insights to support in the settings for the foundations of Enterprise Interoperability science. After an introduction of EI research domain and its motivation and needs to have it developed as a science-base, the authors propose a methodology and action plan to implement it. The proposal presented has been validated by a large community of researchers working in the El domain, with the support of the European Commission, through the Future Internet and Enterprise Systems (FInES) cluster of research projects, lead by the ENSEMBLE project.