Today, companies investigate various domains of collaborative business-to-business e-commerce. They have to look inward to their applications and processes. These applications must be able to cooperate dynamically. This leads to a rise of cooperative business processes, which need the integration of autonomous and heterogeneous applications. However, currently existing approaches for application integration lack an adequate specification of the semantics of the terminology that leads to inconsistent interpretations. In this paper, we propose a formal solution to the problem of application integration and we reflect upon the suitability of the ontology as a candidate for solving the problem of heterogeneity and ensure greater interoperability between applications.