Now showing 1 - 10 of 25
  • Publication
    A Hybrid Architecture for Enabling Electronic Transactions Among Enterprises and Governmental Bodies
    (Springer, 2006-11-29)
    Schroth, Christoph
    ;
    Gionis, Giorgios
    ;
    Charalabidis, Yannis
    ;
    Janner, Till
    ;
    Koussouris, Sotirios
    ;
    Askounis, Dimitris
    ;
    Reimer, Ulrich
    ;
    Karagiannis, Dimitris
    Today electronic transactions constitute a constantly growing business reality that promises advantages such as reduced transactional cost, seamless information flow, and better communication and collaboration with business partners. However, the creation of a system clearly oriented towards promoting interoperability of existing systems and facilitating electronic transactions between partners of diverse nature, like enterprises and governmental bodies, still faces significant drawbacks such as the high technical complexity of the proposed solutions or the need for intervention of third-party systems in the transactions. Such problems can largely be attributed to the adopted architectures - primarily peer to peer and server based - that impose specific preconditions in the design and implementation of the systems. The present work is an attempt to define and justify a hybrid architecture that shares common elements with peer to peer and server based architectures and relies on emerging technologies and standards in order to achieve application to application interconnection and seamless information flow directly among heterogeneous systems. The approach implies the establishment of a server based environment that will provide all the necessary requirements for enterprise applications to interoperate, execute dynamic workflows and exchange business documents of different formats with applications and systems of other enterprises and governmental bodies.
  • Publication
    Implementing Next Generation e-Business Platforms for Heterogeneous SME Environments
    (New Technologies Publications, 2007-05-18)
    Gionis, Giorgios
    ;
    Mouzakitis, Spiros
    ;
    Janner, Till
    ;
    Schroth, Christoph
    ;
    Koussouris, Sotirios
    ;
    Askounis, Dimitris
    Ever since the adoption of Internet and the relevant Internet-Based technologies by enterprises into their everyday business practise the vision of totally automated electronic transactions has been the Holy Grail of their efforts. In spite of competitive advantages, such as reduced transactional cost, seamless information flow, and better communication, the creation of a system clearly oriented towards promoting interoperability of existing systems and facilitating electronic transactions between partners of diverse nature still remains elusive for the majority of enterprises, especially for small and medium ones. Drawbacks, such as the high technical complexity of the existing solutions, the need for intervention of third-party systems in the transactions, the mandatory adoption of proprietary standards and practises have characterised this first generation of platforms for electronic transactions. Such problems can largely be attributed to the adopted architectures - primarily peer to peer and server based - that impose specific preconditions in the design and implementation of the systems. The present work is an attempt to define and justify a novel platform that shares common elements with peer to peer and server based approaches and relies on emerging technologies and standards in order to achieve application to application interconnection and seamless information flow directly among heterogeneous systems.
  • Publication
    UN/CEFACT e-Business framework: Closing the semantic gap of Service-Oriented Architectures
    ( 2007-03-27)
    Schroth, Christoph
    ;
    Janner, Till
    ;
    Stuhec, Gunther
    1/2 day tutorial at 3rd International Conference on Interoperability for Enterprise Software and Applications (I-ESA 2007). Tutorial summary: Service-Oriented Architectures are emerging as the next-generation standard for seamless and automated e-Business infrastructures and cross-organizational Enterprise Application Integration. However, existing SOA concepts only concentrate on technological issues and do not address semantic level standardization. To be truly effective, SOA standards must be extended to the semantic level. Through the Core Components Standards Stack (CCTS), the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) is developing an evolutionary and collaborative approach for the standardization of both business processes and data that closes the semantic gap existing in current SOA deployments. The EU-funded project GENESIS leverages the UN/CEFACT-based standards to establish a Web service-based e-Business platform. Building on both the UN/CEFACT standards and the emerging GENESIS project, this tutorial presents a prototype environment for modelling CCTS conformant business data. Practical exercises are performed to demonstrate its real- world applicability and the great advantages for increasing cross-organizational SOA. As the presenters are actively involved as members/ group chairs of the UN/CEFACT, they will also provide detailed insights into latest developments and standardization activities of this organization. Preliminary Agenda: 1. Current approaches and related research work 2. UN/CEFACT e-Business framework in a nutshell 2.1. Overview of the composite of modular specifications and the notion of collaborative and evolutionary modelling 2.2. CCTS as a major lever for modelling business information 2.3. UMM as affiliated approach for modelling collaborative business processes 2.4. Interconnection between the UN/CEFACT semantic modelling methodologies and SOAs as a technical foundation 3. Presentation of a first use case of the UN/CEFACT framework 3.1. GENESIS project overview 3.2. Advantages and challenges of applying UN/CEFACT standards to a e-Business platform 4. Presentation of prototype modelling environment 4.1. Requirements of a semantics-oriented modelling tool for both business processes and data 4.2. Practical exercise with a first prototype: Modelling of a commonly used process including the involved business documents 5. Conclusion and outlook on future research challenges in the field of seamless cross-organizational interoperability The tutorial is targeted to an audience of (but not limited to) people with a research or industrial background and interest in the following topics: - Industrial Data Standards - Next-generation SOA - Enterprise Interoperability - Enterprise Application Integration - Semantic Meta-Data - Semantic Data Mapping - Context-Driven Data Engineering - Conception of Enterprise Modelling Environments Conference Website: http://www.aidima.es/iesa2007/ Best Paper Award: http://www.aidima.es/iesa2007/iniciomenu.asp?opcion=98&link=../web/nuevo/award/best_paper_award.htm&i1=98 SAP Developer Network: https://weblogs.sdn.sap.com/pub/wlg/6119
  • Publication
    From EDI to UN/CEFACT: An Evolutionary Path Towards a Next Generation e-Business Framework
    ( 2006-11-02)
    Janner, Till
    ;
    Schmidt, Alexander
    ;
    Schroth, Christoph
    ;
    Stuhec, Gunther
    Modern e-Business frameworks have evolved from traditional EDI technology. The evolutionary development towards current e-Business stacks like RosettaNet led to an increased degree of integration and operational efficiency. Nevertheless, significant shortcomings still exist. Especially on the semantic level of data and process engineering further improvements are expected to harmonize the diversity and redundancy of existing e-Business stacks. UN/CEFACT's standardization efforts are a promising solution towards next generation e-Business frameworks. The authors intend to provide a picture of the future of e-Commerce by evaluating three cornerstones of e-Business standard evolution: EDI, RosettaNet and a novel combination of specifications issued by UN/CEFACT.
  • Publication
    Business Models for Enterprise Interoperability Platforms
    (Centre for Concurrent Enterprises, 2008-06-23)
    Bucherer, Eva
    ;
    Hoyer, Volker
    ;
    Thoben, Klaus-Dieter
    ;
    S. Pawar, Kulwant
    ;
    Gonçalves, Ricardo
    Today value creation is highly dependent on information and communication technology but also on cooperation between companies. The traditional value chain has been replaced by dynamic value networks. To support this new form of business, solutions for Enterprise Interoperability (EI) are indispensible. One possible form of solution constitutes EI platforms. To market them successfully adequate business models have to be found. Based on a business model framework this work evaluates factors that have to be considered in business models for EI platform providers. Moreover this work gives a concrete example of how a business model could look like in the concrete case of such a platform which is subject of the EU-funded research project GENESIS. In addition, possible implications are discussed.
  • Publication
    Small and Medium Enterprise's Benefits of Next Generation e-Business Platforms
    (The American Academy of Business and ABI/ Proquest, 2006-12-13)
    Hoyer, Volker
    ;
    Janner, Till
    ;
    Mayer, Peter
    ;
    Raus, Marta
    ;
    Schroth, Christoph
    In this work, we propose a novel e-Business architecture that takes into account the specific needs of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The envisioned system supports collaborative and evolutionary modeling, semi-automatic negotiation and finally execution of business processes and ensures true interoperability through a common semantic repository. Potential business partners are enabled to easily retrieve each other and initiate business relations in an extremely intuitive manner. With the help of the Balanced Scorecard approach, we thoroughly investigate economic benefits SMEs will experience when participating at this system. The analysis highlights advantages regarding five different perspectives: SMEs may capitalize from reduced operating costs and improved gains (financial perspective), increased customer satisfaction and retention (customer perspective), faster and more efficient internal processes (internal working process perspective), improved supply chain integration (supply chain perspective), and technological advancements (system benefits).
    Type:
    Journal:
    Volume:
    Issue:
  • Publication
    GENESIS project poster
    ( 2006-11-29)
    Gionis, George
    ;
    Janner, Till
    ;
    Schroth, Christoph
    GENESIS project poster
  • Publication
    UN/CEFACT Service-Oriented Architecture: Enabling Both Semantic And Application Interoperability
    (VDE-Verl., 2007-03-01)
    Schroth, Christoph
    ;
    Janner, Till
    ;
    Stuhec, Gunther
    ;
    Braun, Torsten
    Service-Oriented Architectures are about to emerge as the next-generation standard for seamless and automatized e-Business infrastructures and cross-organizational Enterprise Application Integration. With the help of unified interfaces, individual systems' particularities can be hidden, thereby facilitating the exchange of data between heterogeneous applications. However, existing concepts mainly concentrate on technological issues and must be extended toward the semantic level to ensure that different applications have the same understanding of the business meaning of services. We propose a novel composite of several methodologies issued by the UN/CEFACT that bridges the semantic gap existing in current SOA deployments by introducing a loose coupling between the meaning of business data and its representation. This standards composite builds upon an evolutionary and collaborative approach and supports the modeling of both commonly comprehensible business documents and collaboration processes.
  • Publication
    Service Composition Strategies for Loosely Coupled Information Chains
    ( 2007-09-17)
    Schroth, Christoph
    ;
    Janner, Till
    ;
    Hoyer, Volker
    Web Services have experienced great interest during the last years as they are expected to act as enablers of seamless application-to-application integration both within company boundaries and on a global scale. Especially the automation of cross-organizational, information intensive business processes through the loose composition of standardized services is believed to significantly reduce costs and increase operational agility. In this work, we present three different strategies to supporting Web Service composition across corporate boundaries: A central service orchestration architecture, a hybrid orchestration approach with hub support and finally a fully decentralized orchestration solution without any central control entity. We evaluate and compare the three strategies on the basis of the eight criteria functional scope, monitoring capabilities, fault detection and removal, simultaneousness of process instance execution, scalability, security, seamless interoperability of the coupled applications as well as end-point complexity. The analysis shows that the hybrid approach represents the most promising solution as it unifies the advantages of centralized and decentralized strategies. www.sysedv.tu-berlin.de/SemSoc/ http://www.icsoc.org/
  • Publication
    Advancing Interoperability for Agile Cross-Organisational Collaborations: A Rule-Based Approach
    (IGI-Global, 2010)
    Gionis, George
    ;
    Schroth, Christoph
    ;
    Janner, Till
    Gionis, Schroth and Janner present a comprehensive Model-Driven Architecture for enabling agile cross-organisational collaboration, in an international context, by integrating business and legal rules in private and collaborative processes, business documents and their resulting service orchestrations. The resulting framework, that was mostly developed and applied in the course of the EU-funded research project GENESIS, ranges from graphical process and data models and declarative rule structures to the technical specification of a hybrid software architecture for integrating rule with process and data models.