Enabling Semantic Interoperability in e-Government: A System-based Methodological Framework for XML Schema Management at National Level

Articulating semantic interoperability in e-Government remains in question as long as the international standardization efforts do not reach a consensus on how to semantically annotate and exchange data, but merely focus on the syntactic aspects by publishing sets of XML Schemas. As one-stop governmental services at national and cross-county level become an imperative, the need for standardized data definitions, codification of existing unstructured information and a framework for managing governmental data in a unified way emerges. Effectively applied to the Greek e-Government National Interoperability Framework, this paper proposes a methodology for designing semantically enriched XML Schemas with which homogenized governmental information complies, based on the UN/CEFACT Core Components Technical Specification (CCTS). A discussion around a prospective architecture for managing large sets of XML Schemas is also motivated in order to recognize the necessary components and the key issues that need to be tackled when designing a Governmental Schema Registry

ISURF: RFID Enabled Collaborative Supply Chain Planning Environment

To be able to cope with the requirements of today’s competitive and demanding digital world of business, companies, especially SMEs, need to be more agile, and be ready to react to the changing requirements of the sector. This requires a better view and a more comprehensive analysis of the whole marketplace which can be achieved through a knowledge oriented collaborative supply chain planning initiative. The parties also need to be capable of monitoring the supply chain visibility in a real time fashion, which can be enabled through the use of RFID devices. RFID enabled collaborative supply chain planning has been achieved by big industry players in well defined restricted business circumstances through some selected standard message schemes. However, SMEs are still far behind in this process due to their small IT budgets. In iSURF Project we address this problem by providing a set of open source tools to enable seamless collection of supply chain visibility, synchronizing this with master data, exchanging supply chain visibility and other planning data with each other through a service oriented supply chain planning environment which also handles the interoperability of the messages exchanged

Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi- Bilgi Toplumu Teknolojileri- Mükemmeliyet merkez projesi

TÜBİTAK EEEAG Proje01.02.200

Semantic and Syntactic Matching of Heterogeneous e-Catalogues

In e-procurement, companies use e-catalogues to exchange product infor-mation with business partners. Matching e-catalogues with product requests helps the suppliers to identify the best business opportunities in B2B e-Marketplaces. But various ways to specify products and the large variety of e-catalogue formats used by different business actors makes it difficult. This Ph.D. thesis aims to discover potential syntactic and semantic rela-tionships among product data in procurement documents and exploit it to find similar e-catalogues. Using a Concept-based Vector Space Model, product data and its semantic interpretation is used to find the correlation of product data. In order to identify important terms in procurement documents, standard e-catalogues and e-tenders are used as a resource to train a Product Named Entity Recognizer to find B2B product mentions in e-catalogues. The proposed approach makes it possible to use the benefits of all availa-ble semantic resources and schemas but not to be dependent on any specific as-sumption. The solution can serve as a B2B product search system in e-Procurement platforms and e-Marketplaces

A characteristics framework for Semantic Information Systems Standards

Semantic Information Systems (IS) Standards play a critical role in the development of the networked economy. While their importance is undoubted by all stakeholders—such as businesses, policy makers, researchers, developers—the current state of research leaves a number of questions unaddressed. Terminological confusion exists around the notions of “business semantics”, “business-to-business interoperability”, and “interoperability standards” amongst others. And, moreover, a comprehensive understanding about the characteristics of Semantic IS Standards is missing. The paper addresses this gap in literature by developing a characteristics framework for Semantic IS Standards. Two case studies are used to check the applicability of the framework in a “real-life” context. The framework lays the foundation for future research in an important field of the IS discipline and supports practitioners in their efforts to analyze, compare, and evaluate Semantic IS Standard

MODI framework - A model-based approach to data integration

In this thesis we propose a model-based approach to support data integration between heterogeneous enterprise systems. It reviews literature about interoperability, and presents several aspects of data integration problems. Further, it intends to give the reader an understanding of model-driven development which offers different standards for modeling and model transformation. The work of this thesis presents difficulties encountered in data integration by analysing problem examples. Based on the analysis, data integration problems are defined. We examine technologies related to interoperability, data integration and mapping. In addition, we present existing solution approaches to deal with the problem examples. The main goal is to specify how to develop tools for solving data integration problems by describing and realizing mapping between models. The technique which is specified to realize the mapping is presented in our proposed solution, which we have called the MODI Framework