The rapid changes in today's socioeconomic and technological environment in which the enterprises operate necessitate the identification of new requirements that address both theoretical and practical aspects of the Enterprise Information Systems (EIS). Such an evolving environment contributes to both the process and the system complexity which cannot be handled by the traditional architectures. The constant pressure of requirements for more data, more collaboration and more flexibility motivates us to discuss about the concept of Next Generation EIS (NG EIS) which is federated, omnipresent, model-driven, open, reconfigurable and aware. All these properties imply that the future enterprise system is inherently interoperable. This position paper presents the discussion that spans several research challenges of future interoperable enterprise systems, specialized from the existing general research priorities and directions of IFAC Technical Committee 5.3 1 , namely: context-aware systems, semantic interoperability, cyber-physical systems, cloud-based systems and interoperability assessment.

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International audienceToday, enterprises can be characterized by various key facets: globalization, distributed manufacturing, data and knowledge management, advanced automation and robotics, virtual engineering, rapid response to market and more. In today's competitive economy, enterprises need collaborating using Information Technology (IT) and other tools to succeed in this dynamic and heterogeneous business environment. Enterprise integration, interoperability and networking are some of the major disciplines that are enabling companies to improve collaboration and communication in the most effective way. In this direction, the enterprise information systems engineering process aims to develop information systems to respond to increasingly complex objectives, to align these information systems with business goals and processes of the company, or simply to adapt and improve them when facing given requirements or rapidly changing opportunities. As enterprise information systems models become more ubiquitous, the sharing of best-in-class models becomes more desirable. Interoperability between dissimilar systems in sharing information is important, but other aspects are also required in the sharing of enterprise systems knowledge. First, this process is based on the need for collaboration, sharing and mutual understanding of the needs of each stakeholder i.e. each persons involved or affected by the future information system, at each stage of its development. Second, this process follows principles which highlight the need for formal semantics definition of these models to facilitate this work, at various abstraction levels ranging from specification to implementation on site. There is a need to also couple new theoretical results with applied methods and tools supporting existing business reconfiguration and transformation both locally and globally. In this editorial, we reflect on the current and future theory and applications that would further empower networked enterprises by means of collaborative information systems

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