Service assurance across organisational boundaries with semantic mediation

This paper describes an approach to support OSS integration across organisational boundaries. The requirement for such B2B interfaces is expected to increase as is the need to carry out integration in a much more flexible way. Existing approaches for integration tend to be implementation specific, operate at the syntactic level, and are realised by program code. Consequently they are inflexible due to their highly coupled nature and are costly to set up and maintain. An approach to decouple B2B interfaces is introduced, which allows them to be flexibly coupled as required with the use of scalable, semantic mediation. A prototype based on an assurance integration scenario for BT Wholesale's B2B gateway is described.