An open standard for the exchange of information in the Australian timber sector

The purpose of this paper is to describe business-to-business (B2B) communication and the characteristics of an open standard for electronic communication within the Australian timber and wood products industry. Current issues, future goals and strategies for using business-to-business communication will be considered. From the perspective of the Timber industry sector, this study is important because supply chain efficiency is a key component in an organisation's strategy to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Strong improvement in supply chain performance is possible with improved business-to-business communication which is used both for building trust and providing real time marketing data. Traditional methods such as electronic data interchange (EDI) used to facilitate B2B communication have a number of disadvantages, such as high implementation and running costs and a rigid and inflexible messaging standard. Information and communications technologies (ICT) have supported the emergence of web-based EDI which maintains the advantages of the traditional paradigm while negating the disadvantages. This has been further extended by the advent of the Semantic web which rests on the fundamental idea that web resources should be annotated with semantic markup that captures information about their meaning and facilitates meaningful machine-to-machine communication. This paper provides an ontology using OWL (Web Ontology Language) for the Australian Timber sector that can be used in conjunction with semantic web services to provide effective and cheap B2B communications

Contextualized B2B Registries

Abstract. Service discovery is a fundamental concept underpinning the move towards dynamic service-oriented business partnerships. The business process for integrating service discovery and underlying registry technologies into business relationships, procurement and project management functions has not been examined and hence existing Web Service registries lack capabilities required by business today. In this paper we present a novel contextualized B2B registry that supports dynamic registration and discovery of resources within management contexts to ensure that the search space is constrained to the scope of authorized and legitimate resources only. We describe how the registry has been deployed in three case studies from important economic sectors (aerospace, automotive, pharmaceutical) showing how contextualized discovery can support distributed product development processes

Engineering design knowledge management in de-centralised virtual enterprises

The problems of collaborative engineering design and knowledge management at the conceptual stage in a network of dissimilar enterprises was investigated. This issue in engineering design is a result of the supply chain and virtual enterprise (VE) oriented industry that demands faster time to market and accurate cost/manufacturing analysis from conception. The solution consisted of a de-centralised super-peer net architecture to establish and maintain communications between enterprises in a VE. In the solution outlined below, the enterprises are able to share knowledge in a common format and nomenclature via the building-block shareable super-ontology that can be tailored on a project by project basis, whilst maintaining the common nomenclature of the ‘super-ontology’ eliminating knowledge interpretation issues. The two-tier architecture layout of the solution glues together the peer-peer and super-ontologies to form a coherent system for both internal and virtual enterprise knowledge management and product development

Ontology-based standards development: Application of OntoStanD to ebXML business process specification schema

Business-to-Business (B2B) interoperations are an important part of today's global economy. Business process standards are developed to provide a common understanding of the information shared between trading partners. These standards, however, mainly capture the syntax of the transactions and not their semantics. This paper proposes the use of ontologies as the basis for standards development and presents an ontology for the ebXML Business Process Specification Schema (ebBP) with the aim of empowering the capture and sharing of semantics embedded within B2B processes as well as enabling knowledge deduction and reasoning over the shared knowledge. The paper utilises the Ontology-based Standards Development methodology (OntoStanD) as a methodological approach for designing ontological models of standards. This research demonstrates how Semantic Web technologies can be utilised as a basis for standards development and representation in order to improve standards-based interoperability between trading partners

An Evaluation of Inter-Organizational Workflow Modelling Formalisms

This paper evaluates the dynamic aspects of the UML in the context of inter-organizational workflows. Two evaluation methodologies are used. The first one is ontological and is based on the BWW (Bunge-Wand-Weber) models. The second validation is based on prototyping and consists in the development of a workflow management system in the aerospace industry. Both convergent and divergent results are found from the two validations. Possible enhancements to the UML formalism are suggested from the convergent results. On the other hand, the divergent results suggest the need for a contextual specification in the BWW models. Ce travail consiste en une évaluation des aspects dynamiques du language UML dans un contexte de workflow inter-organisationnel. Le choix du language par rapport à d'autres est motivé par sa richesse grammaticale lui offrant une très bonne adaptation à ce contexte. L'évaluation se fait par une validation ontologique basée sur les modèles BWW (Bunge-Wand-Weber) et par la réalisation d'un prototype de système de gestion de workflows inter-organisationnels. À partir des résultats convergents obtenus des deux différentes analyses, des améliorations au formalisme UML sont suggérées. D'un autre coté, les analyses divergentes suggèrent une possibilité de spécifier les modèles BWW à des contextes plus particuliers tels que ceux des workflows et permettent également de suggérer d'autres améliorations possibles au langage.Ontology, Conceptual study, Prototype Validation, UML, IS development methods and tools., Ontologie, étude conceptuelle, validation du prototype, UML, méthodes et outils de développement IS

Modeling views in the layered view model for XML using UML

In data engineering, view formalisms are used to provide flexibility to users and user applications by allowing them to extract and elaborate data from the stored data sources. Conversely, since the introduction of Extensible Markup Language (XML), it is fast emerging as the dominant standard for storing, describing, and interchanging data among various web and heterogeneous data sources. In combination with XML Schema, XML provides rich facilities for defining and constraining user-defined data semantics and properties, a feature that is unique to XML. In this context, it is interesting to investigate traditional database features, such as view models and view design techniques for XML. However, traditional view formalisms are strongly coupled to the data language and its syntax, thus it proves to be a difficult task to support views in the case of semi-structured data models. Therefore, in this paper we propose a Layered View Model (LVM) for XML with conceptual and schemata extensions. Here our work is three-fold; first we propose an approach to separate the implementation and conceptual aspects of the views that provides a clear separation of concerns, thus, allowing analysis and design of views to be separated from their implementation. Secondly, we define representations to express and construct these views at the conceptual level. Thirdly, we define a view transformation methodology for XML views in the LVM, which carries out automated transformation to a view schema and a view query expression in an appropriate query language. Also, to validate and apply the LVM concepts, methods and transformations developed, we propose a view-driven application development framework with the flexibility to develop web and database applications for XML, at varying levels of abstraction

Open Standard, Open Source and Peer to Peer Methods for Collaborative Product Development and Knowledge Management

Tools such as product data management (PDM) and its offspring product lifecycle management (PLM) enable collaboration within and between enterprises. Large enterprises have invariably been the target of software vendors for development of such tools, resulting in large entralized applications. These are beyond the means of small to medium enterprises (SME). Even after these efforts had been made, large enterprises face numerous difficulties with PLM. Firstly, enterprises evolve, and an evolving enterprise needs an evolving data management system. With large applications, such configuration changes have to be made at the server level by dedicated staff. The second problem arises when enterprises wish to collaborate with a large number of suppliers and original equipment manufacturer (OEM) customers. Current applications enable collaboration using business-to-business (B2B) protocols. However, these do not take into account that disparate enterprises do not have unitary data models or workflows. This is a strong factor in reducing the abilities of large enterprises to participate in collaborative project

Intelligent Agents to Support Information Sharing in B2B E-Marketplaces

This article proposes an architecture to support information and knowledge exchange between collaborating business partners. The focus is on knowledge representation and exchange by intelligent agents to support collaborative business functions through agents that exchange problem-specific information in standardized formats. The article then shows the application of the proposed architecture in the context of an infomediary-based B2B E-marketplace