KWTR: ebusiness

[edit] Contributors:

please write your name and affiliation

Please add your CV in the list of contributors

[edit] What is the state of the art of Semantic Web in your research field?

E-business as an expression appeared in the late 90's after the advent of the Internet. E-business encompasses many things and its scope varies according to the different viewpoints. According to Wikipedia (as of August 2007), for example, "e-business may be defined broadly as any business process that relies on an automated information system. E-business software solutions allow the integration of intra and inter firm business processes [and] can be conducted using the Web, the Internet, intranets, extranets, or some combination of these".
As the scope of e-business is wide and somewhat not strictly bounded, so is the scope of Semantic Web applied to e-business. Consequently the state of the art that we propose here is obviously not exhaustive. Nevertheless we try to provide a high level classification of the research work that has been carried out in the past and/or is currently being conducted in this research field.
Every entity, either a company or an administration, is confronted to the problem of heterogeneity when it comes to conducting automated operations between its own information system and that of another entity. Albeit heterogeneity at the syntactic level can easily be overcome through the use of standard or ad hoc solutions, heterogeneity at the semantic level remains a major challenge. The Semantic Web is believed to provide good solutions to solve this heterogeneity problem. For instance, according to Y. Zhao and K. Sandahl (DBLP BibTeX) the potential advantages of applying the Semantic Web to Internet commerce (which is a subset of e-business) are:

• Data search,
• Agents,
• Knowledge management,
• Integration,
• Composition of complex systems,
• Multimedia collection,
• Information filtering,
• Machine dialogue across the domains,
• Virtual community,
• Online advertising,
• Serendipity (unexpected benefits),
• Vocabulary flexibility & standardization.

[edit] Provide references and short abstracts of three papers you consider as significant in your research field

Alignment infrastructure for ontology mediation and other applications; Jérôme Euzenat (INRIA).
Abstract: Web services are not the only application requiring ontology matching and mediation. Agent communication, peer-to-peer systems, etc. also need to find relationships between ontologies. However, they do not necessarily require the same kind of mediation as web services. In order to maximise the utility of the semantic web infrastructure, it seems reasonable to share the mediation services among these applications. To that extent we propose an infrastructure based on the reified notion of alignments and show how it can be used in these various cases.

Translating XBRL Into Description Logic. An Approach Using Protégé, Sesame & OWL; Thierry Declerck, Hans-Ulrich Krieger: Business Information Systems, 9th International Conference on Business Information Systems, BIS 2006 (pages 455-467). DBLP BibTeX
Abstract: In the context of the eTen project, WINS, a web-based business intelligence service to public and private financial institutions has been designed and implemented. One of the goals of the project was to provide new financial knowledge on companies from information gathered through interoperable information services. The services were implemented under the new emerging standard XBRL used for financial reporting. We sketch how relevant financial information was extracted from annual financial reports. We also show at the same time the limitations we encountered with the XBRL schema, due to the lack of reasoning support over XML-based data and information extracted from documents. To overcome these difficulties, we describe the "ontologization" of XBRL, which we assume to be a necessary requisite for large intelligent web-based financial information and decision support systems.

WSMX Process Mediation Based on Choreographies; E. Cimpian and A. Mocan (DERI Galway). In C. Bussler and A. Haller, editors, Business Process Management Workshops, volume 3812, pages 130–143, 2005. DBLP BibTeX
Abstract: One of the most difficult obstacles Web Services have to overcome in the attempt to exploit the true potential of the World Wide Web is heterogeneity. Caused by the nature of the Web itself, heterogeneity problems occur both at data level as well as at behavioral level of business logics, message exchange protocol and Web Service invocation. Process mediation is one of the crucial points on the road towards establishing new, ad-hoc cooperation on the web between various business partners. If semantic enhanced data enables dynamic solutions for coping with data heterogeneity, semantically enhanced Web Services can do the same for behavioral heterogeneity. Based on Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO) specifications that offers support in semantically describing Web Services, we propose a solution that acts on these semantic descriptions and offers the means for defining of what we call a Process Mediator. Such a mediator acts on the public processes (represented as WSMO choreographies) of the parties involved in a communication and adjust the bi-directional flow of messages to suit the requested/expected behavior of each party.

[edit] Please provide one or more examples (either business, or research, or both) in which semantic web has been used (if you can, add some references)

Automatic mediation of two OWL-S process models
Algorithm that first analyses both provider's and requester's process models to decide if the mediation is possible, and then performs the actual mediation (whenever possible) at runtime. In this project OWL-S was used to describe the process models, but other process specification languages can also be used (e.g., BPEL4WS in combination with WSDL-S). Reference: Towards automatic mediation of OWL-S process models – Roman Vaculín, Katia Sycara – The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. DBLP BibTeX

[edit] Are there existing tools or demos? Please indicate some of them

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[edit] What are the open problems in your Semantic Web research field? Why?

E-business covers a very wide variety of applications. We mainly focus here on the applications dealing with the exchange of information between business partners (B2B).

Main problem: interoperability between the information systems of two or more business partners. In addition, interoperability must be ensured whenever business needs change following, for example, a partner change, the addition of a new partner, or the evolution of a partner process. Dynamic interoperability is therefore crucial for companies and administrations that wish to engage into business exchanges with partners.

The interoperability problem between different information systems is commonly addressed at two separate but complementary levels: data level and process level.Semantic Web is believed to potentially solve this interoperability problem at both levels: semantics-enhanced data should allow developing solutions that cope with dynamic data heterogeneity as well as dynamic process heterogeneity. For example in the area of Web Services, only a limited level of interoperability can be achieved using the WSDL and BPEL4WS standards due to their focus on syntactical description of Web Services; the newly emerging standards such as OWL-S, WSDL-S and WSMO aim at providing more flexibility in the use of Web Services through the addition of rich semantic annotations.

[edit] Provide references and links of the most relevant Semantic Web research projects in your field

SUPER (Semantics Utilised for Process Management within and between Entreprises) – IST-FP6 (Information Society Technologies - European Union 6th Framework Programme). From April 2006 to March 2009.
www.ip-super.org

STASIS (Software for Ambiant Semantic Interoperable Services) – IST-FP6 (Information Society Technologies - European Union 6th Framework Programme). From September 2006 to August 2009).
www.stasis-project.net

[edit] What challenges try these projects to overcome?

SUPER
This project aims at creating a technological framework constituting BPM enriched with machine readable semantics. SUPER will create horizontal ontologies which describe business processes and vertical telecommunications oriented ontologies to support domain-specific annotation. It uses WSMO.
The challenges that the project tries to overcome are as follows:

• low degree of automation in the implementation stage of BPs,
• implementation delay of BPs,
• cognitively inadequate complexity of BPs as there does not exist a lucid division between BPs and their implementation details,
• process blindness of managers which constitutes upon lack of process query tools,
• invisible, complex interdependencies of BPs which cannot be captured by automated procedures assessing effects of their modification or trying to optimize them.

Additional challenges come from the knowledge sharing and reuse domain. They involve the following matters:

• knowledge of BPs is represented in heterogeneous information sources,
• evolution of BPs in time,
• discrepancies both in within the organizations and between different ones,
• strict control of knowledge flow from within the organization.

(Information taken from SUPER Web site)

STASIS
This project aims at enabling SMEs and other companies to fully participate in the eEconomy, by offering semantic services and applications based on the open SEEM registry and repository network. These services and applications will provide easy access for anyone to analyse, view, compare and distil semantics in an efficient environment in order to more effectively relate the business concepts of one partner with that of another. STASIS is anticipated to deliver a set of services that will enable businesses to interact with each other at the semantic level.
(Information taken from STASIS Web site)

[edit] What are their foreseen benefits (both in market and scientific community)?

SUPER:

• provision of framework allows for integrating heterogeneous BPs,
• construction of supporting ontologies enables rapid response to the change of external and internal environment,
• mediation layer enhances the collaboration between organizations.
  

(Information taken from SUPER Web site)

STASIS:

• research, development and validation of open Web Services-based distributed semantic services for SME empowerment within the automotive industry and furniture sector, as well as other sectors.
  

(Information taken from STASIS Web site)

[edit] When, in your opinion, will projects’ results be ready for industry?

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[edit] Do you think that it is important to invest (money and time) in these topics? Why?

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[edit] What are, in your opinion, the most relevant Semantic Web challenges that will be solved in the long term (10 years)? Why?

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