Enterprise Interoperability Through Provenance-Backed Exchange
Using a messenger ontology and PROV-O to let independent systems and teams exchange data without agreeing on a single internal model.
The business problem
Forcing every team or partner onto one internal data model is usually a multi-year fight nobody wins. The realistic alternative — point-to-point integrations per pair of systems — scales quadratically and breaks quietly when either side changes its schema.
The value case
A thin messenger ontology (a shared vocabulary floor, not a full shared model) plus a validated projection contract per party lets each team keep its own internal model while exchanging data through a stable, SHACL-checked interface. Every exchanged fact carries PROV-O lineage, so when something looks wrong downstream, tracing it back to the originating system and transform is a query, not a forensic investigation.
Where this has legs
This is the same inner-vs-messenger-ontology discipline used to re-architect a monolithic, tightly-coupled ontology into independently versioned, contract-scoped modules — applied at organization-to-organization scale instead of team-to-team.