Business-IT alignment is gaining more importance in enterprises, and is already considered essential for efficiently achieving enterprise goals. This led organizations to follow Enterprise Architecture approaches, with the Information Architecture as one of its pillars. Information architecture aims at providing an integrated and holistic view of the business information, and this requires applying a data integration approach. However, despite several works on data integration research, the problem is far from being solved. The highly heterogeneous computer environments present new challenges such as distinct DBMSs, distinct data models, distinct schemas and distinct semantics, all in the same scenario. On the other hand, new issues in enterprise environment, such as the emergence of BPM and SOA approaches, contribute to a new solution for the problem. This paper presents a service-based approach for data integration, in which the services are derived from the organization's business process models. The proposed approach comprises a framework of different types of services (data services, concept services), a method for data integration service identification from process models, and a metaschema needed for the automation and customization of the proposed approach in a specific organization. We focus on handling heterogeneities with regard to different DBMSs and differences among data models, schemas and semantics.

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After more than thirty years of its first introduction, conceptual modeling remains an important research field, which has been recently addressed by the literature on semantic interoperability in its various forms (model integration, service interoperability, knowledge harmonization, taxonomy alignment), domain engineering and the creation of conceptual models through Natural Language Processing (NLP), to name a few. In the database conceptual design, the designer must learn the language used in the Universe of Discourse (UoD) to be modeled, along with its underlying concepts, and then represent such concepts in a modeling language. Thus, the conceptual modeling process can be seen as a translation. For the resulting model to be both detailed and unambiguous, the designer must represent the UoD in a generative language which constructs can convey the same concepts represented in the respective natural language. For the whole process to be effective, we argue that the adoption of modeling languages and methodologies that are based on well-founded ontological theories is required. We propose the use of a linguistic approach for conceptual modeling from natural language texts, and illustrate how it may be applied using the well-founded modeling language OntoUML.