Using Semantic Web Services in E-Banking Solutions

Offering public access to efficient transactional stock market functionalities is of interest to all banks and bank users. Traditional service oriented architecture (SOA) technology succeeds at providing reasonable, good Web-based brokerage solutions, but may lack extensibility possibilities. By introducing Semantic Web Services (SWS) as a way to integrate third party services from distributed service providers, we propose in this chapter an innovative way to offer online real-time solutions that are easy-to-use for customers. The combined use of ontologies and SWS allows different users to define their own portfolio management strategies regardless of the information provider. In deed the semantic layer is a powerful way to integrate the information of many providers in an easy way. With due regard for more development of security technological issues, research on SWS has shown that the deployment of the technology in commercial solutions is within sight.

Towards the Use of Networked Ontologies for Dealing with Knowledge-Intensive Domains

Knowledge intensive sectors, such as the pharmaceutical, have typically to face the problem of dealing with heterogeneous and vast amounts of information. In these scenarios integration, discovery and an easy access to knowledge are the most important factors. The use of semantics to classify meaningfully the information and to bridge the gap between the different representations that different stakeholders have is widely accepted. The problem arises when the ontologies used to model the domain become too large and unmanageable. The current status of the technology does not allow to easily working with this type of ontologies.In this chapter we propose the use of networked ontologies to solve these problems for the particular case scenario of the nomenclature of products in the pharmaceutical sector in Spain. Instead of using a single ontology, the idea is to break the model in several meaningful pieces and bind them together using a networked ontology model for representing and managing relations between multiple ontologies. The semantic nomenclature is a case study that is currently under development in the EC funded FP6 project NeOn1. Among the main objectives of the case study, are helping in the systematization of the creation, maintenance and keeping up-to-date drug-related information, and to allow an easy integration of new drug resources. In order to do that, the case study tackles the engineering of a drug Reference Ontology, the provision of easy mechanisms for discovery, model and mapping of drug resources in a collaborative way, and the ability to reason on the context of user and ontologies to ease the mapping and retrieving processes.

Experiences in Building Mobile E-Business Services

Organizations in all sectors of business and government are pursuing service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives in response to their need for increased business agility. This is particularly true for mobile telecommunications companies. That is why mobile telecom operators need to research new and innovative sources of revenue. Innovation is not an easy task. It requires embracing a new way of doing business, where new technologies are fundamental. SOA architecture and Web services technology are proposed by IT industry as the best solution to create a network of partnership and new services, but despite software producer claims, interoperability issues arise with service composition. Such a problem can be significantly reduced by adopting a semantic approach in service description and service discovery. Our research is focused on new methods and tools for building high personalized, virtual e-business services. A new service provisioning architecture based on Web services has been conceived, taking into account issues related to end-user mobility. The following pages deal with a proposal for creating real localized, personalized virtual environments using Web services and domain ontologies. In particular, to overcome interoperability issues that could arise from a lack of uniformity in service descriptions, we propose a way for controlling and enforcing annotation policies based on a Service Registration Authority. It allows services to be advertised according to guidelines and domain rules. Furthermore, this solution enables enhanced service/component discovery and validation, helping software engineers to build services by composing building blocks and provision/deliver a set of personalized services.

Towards an Operational REA Business Ontology

It is widely recognized that ontologies can be used to support the semantic integration and interoperability of heterogeneous information systems. Resource Event Agent (REA) is a well-known business ontology that was proposed for ontology-driven enterprise system development. However, the current specification is neither sufficiently explicit nor formal, and thus difficult to operationalize for use in ontology- driven business information systems. In this chapter REA is redesigned and formalized following a methodology based on the reengineering extension of the METHONTOLOGY framework for ontology development. The redesign is focused on developing a UML representation of REA that improves upon existing representations and that can easily be transformed into a formal representation. The formal representation of REA is developed in OWL. The chapter discusses the choices made in redesigning REA and in transforming REA’s UML representation into an OWL representation. It is also illustrated how this new formal representation of the REA-ontology can be used to support ontology-driven supply chain collaboration.

The SEEMP Approach to Semantic Interoperability for E-Employment

SEEMP is a European Project that promotes increased partnership between labour market actors and the development of closer relations between private and public Employment Services, making optimal use of the various actors’ specific characteristics, thus providing job-seekers and employers with better services. The need for a flexible collaboration gives rise to the issue of interoperability in both data exchange and share of services. SEEMP proposes a solution that relies on the concepts of services and semantics in order to provide a meaningful service-based communication among labour market actors requiring a minimal shared commitment.

Semantic Competence Pull

Despite its considerable growth and development during the last decades, the software industry has had to endure several significant problems and drawbacks which have undoubtedly had negative effects. One of these aspects is the lack of alignment between the curricula offered by Universities and other kinds of education and training centres and the professional profiles demanded by companies and organizations. This problem defines the objective of this work: to provide a set of mechanisms and a solution to allow companies to define and express their competency gaps and, at the same time, allow education centres to analyse those gaps and define the training plans to meet those needs.

Towards Semantic Business Processes

The business process execution language for Web services (BPEL4WS, shortly BPEL) is one of the most popular languages and de facto standard for modelling business processes as Web services compositions. However, it only allows using hard-coded syntactical interfaces for partners and the process itself, i.e. semantic descriptions of services cannot be used within a process model. The lacks of an ontological description of the process elements cause limitations in the ways services are used within a process. A service providing the same functionality as the one referenced in the process model, but via a different syntactical interface, cannot be used instead. As a result, a process model cannot find an alternate service that performs the same functionality but exposes a different interface and can crash. Also, another drawback of such business processes is that they expose syntactical interfaces and cannot be discovered and composed dynamically by other semantic enabled systems slowing down the process of interaction between business partners. OWL-S on the other hand is suite of OWL ontologies and can be used to describe the compositions of Web services on the basis of matching semantics as well as to expose semantically enriched interfaces of business processes. Consequently, translating BPEL process descriptions to OWL-S suite of ontologies can overcome syntactical limitations of BPEL processes enabling them to 1) edit and model the composition of Web services on the basis of matching semantics 2) provide semantically enriched information of business processes. This semantically enriched information helps for dynamic and automated discovery, invocation and composition of business processes as Semantic Web services. Describing an approach and its implementation that can be used to enable business processes for semantic based dynamic discovery, invocation and composition by translating BPEL process descriptions to OWL-S suite of ontologies is the aim of this chapter.

Ontologically Enhanced RosettaNet B2B Integration

RosettaNet is an industry-driven e-business process standard that defines common inter-company public processes and their associated business documents. RosettaNet is based on the Service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm and all business documents are expressed in DTD or XML Schema. Our “ontologically-enhanced RosettaNet” effort translates RosettaNet business documents into a Web ontology language, allowing business reasoning based on RosettaNet message exchanges. This chapter describes our extension to RosettaNet and shows how it can be used in business integrations for better interoperability. The usage of a Web ontology language in RosettaNet collaborations can help accommodate partner heterogeneity in the setup phase and can ease the back-end integration, enabling for example more competition in the purchasing processes. It provides also a building block to adopt a semantic SOA with richer discovery, selection and composition capabilities.

A Semantic Web-Based Information Integration Approach for an Agent-Based Electronic Market

With the increasing importance of e-commerce across the Internet, the need for software agents to support both customers and suppliers in buying and selling goods/services is growing rapidly. It is becoming increasingly evident that in a few years the Internet will host a large number of interacting software agents. Most of them will be economically motivated, and will negotiate a variety of goods and services. It is therefore important to consider the economic incentives and behaviours of e-commerce software agents, and to use all available means to anticipate their collective interactions. Even more fundamental than these issues, however, is the very nature of the various actors that are involved in e-commerce transactions. This leads to different conceptualizations of the needs and capabilities, giving rise to semantic incompatibilities between them. Ontologies have an important role in Multi-Agent Systems communication and provide a vocabulary to be used in the communication between agents. It is hard to find two agents using precisely the same vocabulary. They usually have a heterogeneous private vocabulary defined in their own private ontology. In order to provide help in the conversation among different agents, we are proposing what we call ontology-services to facilitate agents’ interoperability. More specifically, we propose an ontology-based information integration approach, exploiting the ontology mapping paradigm, by aligning consumer needs and the market capacities, in a semi-automatic mode. We propose a new approach for the combination of the use of agent-based electronic markets based on Semantic Web technology, improved by the application and exploitation of the information and trust relationships captured by the social networks.

Towards Effectiveness and Transparency in E-Business Transactions

This chapter presents an ontology for customer complaint management, which has been developed in the CCFORM project. CCFORM is an EU funded project (IST-2001-38248) with the aim of studying the foundation of a central European customer complaint portal. The idea is that any consumer can register a complaint against any party about any problem, at one portal. This portal should: support 11 languages, be sensitive to cross-border business regulations, dynamic, and can be extended by companies. To manage this dynamicity and to control companies’ extensions, a customer complaint ontology (CContology) has to be built to underpin the CC portal. In other words, the complaint forms are generated based on the ontology. The CContology comprises classifications of complaint problems, complaint resolutions, complaining parties, complaint-recipients, ‘’best-practices’’, rules of complaint, etc. The main uses of this ontology are (1) to enable consistent implementation (and interoperation) of all software complaint management mechanisms based on a shared background vocabulary, which can be used by many stakeholders. (2) to play the role of a domain ontology that encompasses the core complaining elements and that can be extended by either individual or groups of firms; and (3) to generate CC-forms based on the ontological commitments and to enforce the validity (and/or integrity) of their population. At the end of this chapter, we outline our experience in applying the methodological principles (Double-Articulation and Modularization) and the tool (DogmaModeler) that we used in developing the CContology.