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

CARL: a Complex Applications Interoperability Language based on semantic technologies for platform-as-a-service integration and cloud computing

Cloud Computing technologies have recently gained momentum and moved from a hyped trend to a mature set of technological innovations providing an infraestructure for the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) paradigm. However, a number of questions abaut Cloud-deployed applications inter-operability and cross-integration, stemming from multilple areas of Computer Science domains, have also been raised from a Platform-as-a-Service angle. In this paper, we present CARL, a novel, cutting-edge. interoperative and integration-oriented language based on Semantics Technologies. We provide a formal model and semantics to enable Complex Application management and integration in PaaS environments, together with a thorough demonstration of the breaktrhoughs being provided by CARL.Publicad

Business integration models in the context of web services.

E-commerce development and applications have been bringing the Internet to business and marketing and reforming our current business styles and processes. The rapid development of the Web, in particular, the introduction of the semantic web and web service technologies, enables business processes, modeling and management to enter an entirely new stage. Traditional web based business data and transactions can now be analyzed, extracted and modeled to discover new business rules and to form new business strategies, let alone mining the business data in order to classify customers or products. In this paper, we investigate and analyze the business integration models in the context of web services using a micro-payment system because a micro-payment system is considered to be a service intensive activity, where many payment tasks involve different forms of services, such as payment method selection for buyers, security support software, product price comparison, etc. We will use the micro-payment case to discuss and illustrate how the web services approaches support and transform the business process and integration model.

Framework for a business interoperability quotient measurement model

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova da Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia e Gestão Industrial (MEGI)Over the last decade the context of Interoperability has been changing rapidly. It has been expanding from the largely technically focused area of Information Systems towards Business Processes and Business Semantics. However, there exists a need for more comprehensive ways to define business interoperability and enable its performance measurement as a first step towards improvement of interoperability conditions between collaborating entities. Through extensive literature reviews and analysis of European Research initiatives in this area, this dissertation presents the State of the Art in Business Interoperability. The objective of this dissertation is to develop a model that closely captures the factors that are responsible for Business Interoperability in the context of Collaborative Business Processes. This Business Interoperability Quotient Measurement Model (BIQMM), developed in this dissertation uses an interdisciplinary approach to capture the key elements responsible for collaboration performance. Through the quantification of the relevance of each element to the particular collaboration scenario in question, this model enables a quantitative analysis of Business Interoperability, so that an overall interoperability score can be arrived at for enhanced performance measurements.Finally, the BIQMM is applied to a business case involving Innovayt and LM Glassfiber to demonstrate its applicability to different collaboration scenarios

Novel processes for smart grid information exchange and knowledge representation using the IEC common information model

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The IEC Common Information Model (CIM) is of central importance in enabling smart grid interoperability. Its continual development aims to meet the needs of the smart grid for semantic understanding and knowledge representation for a widening domain of resources and processes. With smart grid evolution the importance of information and data management has become an increasingly pressing issue not only because far more data is being generated using modern sensing, control and measuring devices but also because information is now becoming recognised as the ‘integral component’ that facilitates the optimal flexibility required of the smart grid. This thesis looks at the impacts of CIM implementation upon the landscape of smart grid issues and presents research from within National Grid contributing to three key areas in support of further CIM deployment. Taking the issue of Enterprise Information Management first, an information management framework is presented for CIM deployment at National Grid. Following this the development and demonstration of a novel secure cloud computing platform to handle such information is described. Power system application (PSA) models of the grid are partial knowledge representations of a shared reality. To develop the completeness of our understanding of this reality it is necessary to combine these representations. The second research contribution reports on a novel methodology for a CIM-based model repository to align PSA representations and provide a knowledge resource for building utility business intelligence of the grid. The third contribution addresses the need for greater integration of information relating to energy storage, an essential aspect of smart energy management. It presents the strategic rationale for integrated energy modeling and a novel extension to the existing CIM standards for modeling grid-scale energy storage. Significantly, this work has already contributed to a larger body of work on modeling Distributed Energy Resources currently under development at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in the USA.Dr. Martin Bradley on behalf of National Grid Plc. and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC

Current trends on ICT technologies for enterprise information s²ystems

The proposed paper discusses the current trends on ICT technologies for Enterprise Information Systems. The paper starts by defining four big challenges of the next generation of information systems: (1) Data Value Chain Management; (2) Context Awareness; (3) Interaction and Visualization; and (4) Human Learning. The major contributions towards the next generation of information systems are elaborated based on the work and experience of the authors and their teams. This includes: (1) Ontology based solutions for semantic interoperability; (2) Context aware infrastructures; (3) Product Avatar based interactions; and (4) Human learning. Finally the current state of research is discussed highlighting the impact of these solutions on the economic and social landscape