Author:
George Feuerlicht
Affiliation:
University of Technology, Sydney and University of Economics, Australia
Keyword(s):
e-Business interoperability, SOA, e-Business standards.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Artificial Intelligence
;
Biomedical Engineering
;
Collaboration and e-Services
;
Complex Systems Modeling and Simulation
;
Data Engineering
;
e-Business
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Health Information Systems
;
Integration/Interoperability
;
Interoperability
;
Knowledge Management and Information Sharing
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
Ontologies and the Semantic Web
;
Sensor Networks
;
Simulation and Modeling
;
Software Agents and Internet Computing
;
Software and Architectures
;
Symbolic Systems
Abstract:
Starting with EDI in the 1970s numerous efforts have been made to facilitate electronic business communications. Early attempts based on proprietary document formats and VAN (Value Added Networks) networks have been superseded by a range of international standards that include ebXML, UBL, BODs, GS1, RosettaNet and numerous other XML-based specifications. While successful in some industry domains, overall e-business standardization suffers from complexity of the specifications, difficult customization and limited extensibility leading to expensive implementation and low adoption rates. A common feature of such e-business standards is their focus on documents as the key artefacts of business communications and reliance on document engineering methods for the design of the standard specifications. In this paper we briefly review the main e-business document standards, and then argue that the document-centric interoperability model underlying most current e-business standards produces in
flexible specifications that are difficult to evolve and maintain. As an alternative to the document-centric interoperability model we advocate a service-centric approach based on well-designed domain services.
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