Embodiments of the invention address interoperability issues between incompatible applications by use of a map engine. In one embodiment the map engine enables a mapping between the messages exchanged between two incompatible applications thereby enabling the interacting applications understand messages exchanged between them. In other embodiments, the map engine maps a parameter associated with one application to a parameter associated with another application based on a mapping rule, where the applications differ from each other owing to non-conforming standards used for their implementation or to the two applications having different service description formats or different messaging formats, or to different platforms used for their implementation. In another embodiment of the invention, the map engine extracts the mapping rule from a knowledge base to enable the mapping between the two incompatible applications. The knowledge base stores data based on which the parameters associated with the two applications may be mapped.