Background and motivation

Enterprise Collaboration (EC) and Enterprise Interoperability (EI) have been the two major research catalysts for DG INFSO D4 "Networked Enterprise & Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)", and aggregated tens of projects and hundreds of researchers in their projects clusters initiatives. COIN is rooted in the previous initiatives.

Enterprise Collaboration comes from a business perspective and identifies the process of enterprises - mainly SMEs - to set-up and manage cross-enterprise win-win business relations in response to business opportunities; Enterprise Interoperability originated by the ICT world and identifies a capability of enterprise software and applications to be integrated at the level of data, applications, processes and models. COIN promoters believe that EC and EI are different concepts which cannot be merged or confused but that they are so interdependent and simultaneously present in every networked enterprise, that they can be really considered as the two sides of the same COIN.