A Hybrid Framework for Automated and Adaptive E-Business Platforms

The automation of business transactions between corporations has been dominated by proprietary and inflexible EDI solutions for a long time. During the last years, novel XML-based standards emerged which have a wider scope than EDI but strongly differ with regard to granularity and industry-focus. Due to the abundance of many complex standards with limited diffusion among users and industries, especially small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have not yet managed to automate the execution of business transactions and to seamlessly interconnect their respective IT applications. In this work, we propose a novel approach which builds on a composite of existing standards and combines them towards a hybrid architecture facilitating electronic business transactions. The Web Service stack represents the technical foundation of this approach, while parts of the ebXML standard are leveraged to ensure a common understanding of business information and processes between trading partners. A central server acts as repository of formal agreements, common data and process modeling artifacts and allows for intermittent connectivity of the users. Decentral adapter components enable connecting heterogeneous legacy applications of the users to the central server. The resulting approach can thus be considered as hybrid regarding the degree of centralism involved and with respect to the combination of the Web services stack and the ebXML standard as an infrastructural foundation

An Empirical Analysis of Development Processes for Anticipatory Standards

There is an evolution in the process used by standards-development organizations (SDOs) and this is changing the prevailing standards development activity (SDA) for information and communications technology (ICT). The process is progressing from traditional SDA modes, typically involving the selection from many candidate, existing alternative components, into the crafting of standards that include a substantial design component (SSDC), or 'anticipatory' standards. SSDC require increasingly important roles from organizational players as well as SDOs. Few theoretical frameworks exist to understand these emerging processes. This project conducted archival analysis of SDO documents for a selected subset of web-services (WS) standards taken from publicly available sources including minutes of meetings, proposals, drafts and recommendations. This working paper provides a deeper understanding of SDAs, the roles played by different organizational participants and the compliance with SDO due process requirements emerging from public policy constraints, recent legislation and standards accreditation requirements. This research is influenced by a recent theoretical framework that suggests viewing the new standards-setting processes as a complex interplay among three forces: sense-making, design, and negotiation (DSN). The DSN model provides the framework for measuring SDO progress and therefore understanding future generations of standards development processes. The empirically grounded results are useful foundation for other SDO modeling efforts

Preservation process modelling (including a review of semantic process modelling and workflow languages)

This report describes in a formalised way a comprehensive set of processes for digital preservation. These processes are drawn from a series of relevant projects and standards from the preservation community, including OAIS, TRAC, PLANETS and others. The result is intended to be used as a generic baseline that those interested in audiovisual preservation can refer to, extract and customise processes in order to fit with their specific AV preservation needs

Semantic web for next generation of e-commerce

Web technology left a significant impact for business transaction.The role of buyers and vendors has been replaced by informative websites where the available information of products and services could improve supply chain and delivery cycles.As the market segment grows, the need of having organized and thoughtful web content is increasing.Search functions using keyword-based search are known for its inability for the machine to interpret different terminology with the same meaning.Information needs to be structured for parametric search to locate products with certain combination of traits.Ontology is the solution to structure semantic of product data.It allows computer to process content with meaning for human based consensual terminologies.Ontology provides a shared platform and common understanding of a domain that can be communicated between user and application systems.The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of exploiting ontology based e-commerce for Semantic Web. The ontology is mediator for software agents to communicate and exchange data.These agents can search products with certain traits, negotiate products or automatically configure product or services according to the required specifications.The semantic combination of product data elevate full potential of e-commerce and development of many specialized reasoning services bring full power of Semantic Web Based E-Commerce

From trading to eCommunity management : responding to social and contractual challenges

"The increasing pressure for enterprises to join into agile business networks is changing the requirements on the enterprise computing systems. The supporting infrastructure is increasingly required to provide common facilities and societal infrastructure services to support the lifecycle of loosely-coupled, eContract-governed business networks. The required facilities include selection of those autonomously administered business services that the enterprises are prepared to provide and use, contract negotiations, and furthermore, monitoring of the contracted behaviour with potential for breach management. The essential change is in the requirement of a clear mapping between business-level concepts and the automation support for them. Our work has focused on developing B2B middleware to address the above challenges; however, the architecture is not feasible without management facilities for trust-aware decisions for entering business networks and interacting within them. This paper discusses how trust-based decisions are supported and positioned in the B2B middleware.""The increasing pressure for enterprises to join into agile business networks is changing the requirements on the enterprise computing systems. The supporting infrastructure is increasingly required to provide common facilities and societal infrastructure services to support the lifecycle of loosely-coupled, eContract-governed business networks. The required facilities include selection of those autonomously administered business services that the enterprises are prepared to provide and use, contract negotiations, and furthermore, monitoring of the contracted behaviour with potential for breach management. The essential change is in the requirement of a clear mapping between business-level concepts and the automation support for them. Our work has focused on developing B2B middleware to address the above challenges; however, the architecture is not feasible without management facilities for trust-aware decisions for entering business networks and interacting within them. This paper discusses how trust-based decisions are supported and positioned in the B2B middleware.""The increasing pressure for enterprises to join into agile business networks is changing the requirements on the enterprise computing systems. The supporting infrastructure is increasingly required to provide common facilities and societal infrastructure services to support the lifecycle of loosely-coupled, eContract-governed business networks. The required facilities include selection of those autonomously administered business services that the enterprises are prepared to provide and use, contract negotiations, and furthermore, monitoring of the contracted behaviour with potential for breach management. The essential change is in the requirement of a clear mapping between business-level concepts and the automation support for them. Our work has focused on developing B2B middleware to address the above challenges; however, the architecture is not feasible without management facilities for trust-aware decisions for entering business networks and interacting within them. This paper discusses how trust-based decisions are supported and positioned in the B2B middleware."Peer reviewe