This book presents fundamental concepts and technologies to tackle interoperability between
information systems. It details interoperability at the data service and process level and
combines theoretical foundations with hands-on presentation of technologies to enable the
development of sound and practical integration. Chapter 1 details general interoperability
challenges and describes the structure of the book. To start with Chapter 2 presents
technologies for the exchange of data between two selected and highly relevant data formats
i.e. relational databases and XML. Next Chapter 3 explains concepts for schema matching and
mapping and data integration as well as the technological basis for implementing them based on
query and transformation languages like XPath and XSLT. Chapter 4 then turns to service
interoperability and explains two related technologies - REST and GraphQL - in detail. In
Chapter 5 fundamentals for designing process orchestrations at the conceptual level are
presented focusing on how to model process orchestrations and how to verify their correctness
and soundness and showing BPMN as the de facto modeling standard. Chapter 6 then details the
concepts and languages for the implementation of process orchestrations including the
presentation of execution languages for process orchestrations that are equipped with a formal
semantics e.g. Workflow Nets the Refined Process Structure Tree and CPEE Trees.
Subsequently Chapter 7 focuses on the growing number of distributed loosely coupled and
often non-interoperable applications through the concepts of enterprise application integration
and explains these by an implementation in CPN Tools and by two case studies. Eventually
Chapter 8 is lifting the orchestration and integration concepts and technologies to the
choreography level by dealing with the interoperability between different process
orchestrations. Chapter 9 concludes the book by featuring success factors for interoperability
projects. It also provides a range of open research directions for interoperability such as
compliance sensor fusion and blockchain technologies. The book is mainly intended as a
textbook to be used for developing and teaching courses on interoperability and integration. To
this end it is accompanied by a Web site with additional teaching materials. It also spans a
bridge from researchers to graduate students and practitioners by providing a deep
understanding on practical interoperability challenges and solutions. The focus here is put on
de facto standards and open-source systems and tools to enable interoperability solutions at
low cost.
