Business Document Exchange between Small Companies

This chapter is aimed at presenting a practical approach, and its technological implementation, for enabling small companies to exchange business documents in different formats and languages with minimal impact on their legacy systems and working practices. The proposed solution differs from the general-purpose or theoretical approaches reported in other chapters of this book, as it is intended to focus on the basic interoperability requirements of small companies in their real life. Special attention is spent to show how to define a minimal reference ontology, use it for annotating the data fields in legacy systems, and map it onto existing standards in order to remove the cultural and technical obstacles for small companies to join the global electronic market. These techniques have been studied and prototyped, and are presently validated, by some EU-funded projects.

The Semantic Web as a Catalyst for Enterprise/Industrial Interoperability

The modern enterprise has to operate in quite a challenging environment that is characterized by competition on a global scale. The need for increased enterprise competitiveness is the driving force behind enterprise interoperability. Starting from B2B applications and relevant technologies, and taking advantage of the technological advancements of the Semantic Web, enterprise interoperability includes both intra-enterprise interoperability of different units/systems of an enterprise and inter-enterprise interoperability of collaborating and at the same time competing enterprises. Enterprise modeling and Semantic Web technologies result in the formal description of the enterprise environment and the exposal of its functionalities as services. Such services represent a major mechanism of the Internet of the future enabling a more innovation driven economy.

Development of an Ontology-Based E-Recruitment Application that Integrates Social Web

This chapter presents the elaboration of an ontology-based application called Combine. This application aims to optimize and enhance e-Recruitment processes in the domain of Information Technologies’ staffing services, and especially e-Recruitment processes that use Social Web platforms as a means of sourcing candidates. This chapter will describe the context motivating this development and how the system was designed, from the requirements analysis to the prototype evaluation, revealing the concerns, constraints and opportunities met along the way. All of these factors will be discussed mainly in regards to Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) theories in order to argue the potential return on investment of the conceptualized semantic e-Recruitment application.

Approaches for Evaluating the Conformance and Interoperability of Ontology Engineering Tools

This chapter presents two characteristics of ontology engineering tools that have a high relevance for the application of these tools, namely, their conformance and interoperability. It also discusses two methods for evaluating the conformance and interoperability of ontology engineering tools and the test data that can be used in such evaluations.

Putting Interoperability on the Map

Information sharing and interoperability are key ingredients for any system that participates in Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and wants to communicate and exchange information with other partners. Although there are many technologies that support interoperability, there is apparently no relevant research about how to extract and aggregate the requirements of a system, the necessary architecture components and tools regarding interoperability. This chapter reviews the principles and the constraints that affect architecture design and the research efforts about interoperability infrastructures, and proposes a set of architecture components and tools that can enable, support and maintain interoperability in heterogeneous, dynamic, and constantly changing environments.

Semantic Technologies and E-Business

This chapter studies what semantic technologies can bring to the e-business domain and how they can be applied to it. After an overview of the goals to be achieved by e-business applications a large panel of existing e-business standards is detailed, with a specific focus on B2B (Business to Business) and their current modus operandi. Furthermore, some of the most relevant e-business ontologies are also presented. Next, the chapter argues that the use of semantic technologies will simplify the automatic management of many e-business partnerships. However the construction of ontologies brings a new level of complexity that might be facilitated by automating the great part of the generation process. For this purpose, the Janus system, which is a prototype to help with the automatic derivation of ontologies from XML Schemas, the de-facto format adopted in e-business standard applications was developed. Differently from existing systems, it permits to retrieve automatically conceptual knowledge from large XML corpus sources and is based on the use of the Semantic Data Model for Ontology (SDMO) whose advantages are presented in this chapter.

A Semantic Similarity Analysis for Data Mappings between Heterogeneous XML Schemas

One of the most critical steps to integrating heterogeneous e-business applications using different XML schemas is schema mapping, which is known to be costly and error-prone. Past research on schema mapping has not made full use of semantic information imbedded in the hierarchical structure of the XML schema. This chapter investigates the existing schema mapping approaches and proposes an innovative semantic similarity analysis approach to facilitate XML schema mapping, merging and reuse. Several key innovations are introduced to better utilize available semantic information. These innovations include: (1) a layered structure analysis of XML schemas, (2) layer-specific semantic similarity measures, and (3) an efficient semantic similarity analysis using parallel and distributed computing technologies. Experimental results using two different schemas from a real world application demonstrate that the proposed approach is valuable for addressing difficulties in XML schema mapping.

Context-Sensitive Ontology Matching in Electronic Business

In today’s global economy, electronic business has offered great advantages to enhance the capabilities of traditional businesses. In order to satisfy the imposed requirement for businesses to coordinate with each other, electronic business partners are chosen to be represented by service agents. These agents need to understand each others’ service descriptions before successful coordination happens. Ontologies developed by service providers to describe their service can render help in this regard. Unfortunately, due to the heterogeneity implicit in independently designed ontologies, distributed agents are bound to face semantic mismatches and/or misunderstandings. This chapter introduces an innovative algorithm, Context-Sensitive Matching, to reconcile heterogeneous ontologies. This algorithm takes into consideration contextual information, via inference through a formal, robust statistical model based on confidence interval. In addition, an Artificial Neural Network is utilized to learning weights for different semantic aspects. At last, an agglomerative clustering algorithm is adopted to generate the final matching results.

Planning Based Service Composition

This chapter presents how automated service composition can be considered as a planning problem. Furthermore it identifies the following three specific technical requirements for planning systems in order to handle service composition problem: (1) richness of domain description, (2) control constructs for assembling complex actions, and (3) a mechanism for plan optimization. This chapter illustrates a number of existing planning systems and discusses their applicability to automated service composition. The chapter then describes a service composition framework, based on a forward chaining planner, and how the abstract plan is instantiated into an executable service. Finally, the chapter discusses future research directions in planning based service composition.

E-Business Interoperability and Collaboration

Current e-business frameworks lack the capability of abstracting the underlying resource infrastructures in order to allow for seamless integration and thus smooth interaction between business entities. Mainly, such frameworks are unable to abstract human, as well as computing resources in a fashion that allows seamless integration into high-level distributed workflow descriptions. Usually, workflows or distributed processes are defined by managers with little background in IT specifications and platforms. Ideally, this should not be necessary at all; however, current solutions do not provide such abstraction support. In this chapter an approach is presented that will overcome this issue allowing for a high-level resource virtualization approach, in particular enabling the integration of human as well as computational resources within high-level workflow descriptions in a SOA fashion.