EMAIL-B

ASED INTEROPERABILITY SERVICE UTILITIES FOR

COOPERATIVE SMALL AND MEDIUM ENTERPRISES

Hong-Linh Truong

, Enrico Morten

, Michal Laclavik

, Thomas Burkhart

, Martin Carpenter

Christoph Dorn

, Panagiotis Gkouvas

, Kalaboukas Konstantinos

, Dario Luiz Lopez

, Cesar Marin

Christian Melchiorre

, Ana Pinuela

, Martin Seleng

and Dirk Werth

Vienna University of Technology, Austria

Softeco Sismat SpA, Italy

Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Slovak Republic

DFKI, Germany

University of Manchester, U.K.

SingularLogic SA, Greece

Atos Origin, Spain

Keywords:

Email, Interoperability service utility, SME cooperation, Recommendation.

Abstract:

As most SMEs utilize email for conducting business, email-based interoperability solutions for SMEs can

have a profound effect on their business. This paper presents a utility-like system to support specialized SMEs

to improve their business via emails by providing system, semantic and process interoperability solutions for

individual SMEs and network of cooperative SMEs. We describe the concept of Email-based Interoperability

Service Utility (EISU) and a software framework that provides almost zero cost interoperability solutions.

1 INTRODUCTION

Today’s individual, specialized SMEs (small

and medium enterprises) are seeking solutions

that enable them to cooperate with each other

and to establish a network of cooperative SMEs

through which they can offer complementary

services (see SMEs and cooperation issues in

http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/enterprise

polic

y/analy-

sis/doc/smes

observ

atory

2003 report5 en.pdf).

Be-

ing able to perform cooperative business with other

SMEs is crucial to an SME but there are many obsta-

cles preventing SMEs doing so. For example, within

(cooperative) SMEs, different types of documents

and requests are exchanged, diverse types of ﬂexible

and adaptive business processes are executed, and

various legacy systems need to be supported; all are

related to the interoperability of software systems,

semantic documents and business processes between

SMEs at different levels. However, SMEs cannot af-

ford to have skilled IT to manage a complex network

of SMEs or to take a long learning curve to master

complex software. While there exist techniques and

framework addressing enterprise interoperabilities at

systems, data and process levels, many of them are

not suitable for SMEs due to various factors, such

as too heavy and costly. SMEs need simple, almost

zero-cost solutions.

The lack of almost zero-cost and simple, yet

powerful, solutions for SMEs to deal with SME

interoperability and cooperation motivates our work

in the Commius project (http://www.commius.eu).

Our approach is to provide SMEs with a utility-like

capability that guarantees a certain set of com-

mon rules for conducting businesses and that is

accessible to the SMEs at a very low cost. To

implement the utility-like capability, we rely on

email communications by providing an open, ﬂexible

Truong H., Morten E., Laclavik M., Burkhart T., Carpenter M., Dorn C., Gkouvas P., Konstantinos K., Lopez D., Marin C., Melchiorre C., Pinuela A.,

Seleng M. and Werth D. (2009).

EMAIL-BASED INTEROPERABILITY SERVICE UTILITIES FOR COOPERATIVE SMALL AND MEDIUM ENTERPRISES.

In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Software Agents and Internet Computing, pages 95-101

DOI: 10.5220/0001993900950101

 SciTePress

software architecture. The rationale is that email

systems, based on SMTP and with diverse email

clients available, are widely used in most SMEs

(see http://www.mariosalexandrou.com/technology-

trends/2003/80-percent-of-users-prefer-email.asp)

and are Internet-scale. This paper presents the

Commius’s conceptual architecture which is a

generic, easy-to-use, modular and extensible soft-

ware framework for SMEs to perform business

cooperation. We have identiﬁed major aspects in

mapping the ISU (Interoperability Service Utility)

vision (http://cordis.europa.eu/ist/ict-ent-net/ei-

roadmap en.htm) into the context of the SMEs

having email-based businesses by determining basic

requirements that ISU-based software for SMEs

should fulﬁl. The Commius architecture is designed

as an open, secured and customizable system, sup-

porting networks of cooperative SMEs to perform

their daily business based on emails and Web. With

this paper, we contribute a novel approach for the

interoperability for SME through business models

and Commius concepts and architecture.

2 MOTIVATION

AND REQUIREMENTS

We examine a motivating scenario from Fedit

(http://en.fedit.com) which integrates 67 Technology

Centers in Spain. Technology Centers (TCs) play a

crucial role within the Spanish industrial arena: al-

most 95% of the Spanish industrial companies are

SMEs, and TCs are the main providers of R&D, in-

novation and state-of-the art services for these SMEs,

including R&D projects, industrial services, training,

knowledge and know-how, and generation of intellec-

tual properties.

As an example, one of the obstacles in Fedit is that

Fedit does not have a central system that includes and

manages TCs. Without such a system, it becomes vir-

tually impossible to commercialize (ﬁnd customers)

and globalize (ﬁnd synergies) the technology and ser-

vices offered by the network of TCs. Currently, the

majority of the queries and demand for technology

and services is received via e-mails, and the time con-

sumed in manually handling the e-mail requests is

huge. Besides, misunderstanding of what is actually

required and what is written in the e-mail makes the

system very inefﬁcient. Fedit, therefore, is search-

ing solutions that is able to make the transition from

the request (in e-mail) and the delivery (identiﬁcation

of service/technology) seamless, transparent and efﬁ-

cient. Instead of designing a new system, Fedit would

beneﬁt from a system enhancing business activities

without changing current work style. It expects vari-

ous tasks to be continued through emails, but with en-

hanced, suggestive features. Examples of such tasks

are an invoice asking for a speciﬁc document, a sim-

ple reply to requests or surveys made from Fedit, and

order to services and hardware suppliers. Such tasks

require interoperability solutions spanning from sys-

tem to data/semantic to process layers and everything

is done via emails, thus bringing various motivations

to our work. However, due to the liability of business

tasks, Fedit expects that found solutions address in-

teroperability issues and make suggestions, while the

ﬁnal decision should be made by Fedit staff.

After studying many other scenarios from the end-

users in Italy and Greece, we have collected require-

ments for a solution aiming to ease SME interoper-

ability and collaboration in the following way:

• Interoperability solutions must support ﬂexible

setup and customization that allows SMEs to

manage business content, partners and users, se-

curity and privacy, external systems and different

types of networks of cooperative clusters.

• Cooperations supported by interoperability solu-

tions have to be monitored to ensure necessary in-

formation between different enterprises interoper-

able and interaction is secured and trusted. These

interactions cover both business cooperation and

system level interactions.

• Interoperability solutions must support ﬂexi-

ble business process execution and monitoring

through emails. Business processes refer to the

core actions done by the SMEs, such as: prepare

and send a request for a business order, receive

and process a request according with the agreed

business process, cooperate to serve a request.

• The solution must be near-zero cost due to the

fact that most SMEs have limited technological

deployment and maintenance capabilities.

To allow a near-zero cost, proposed solutions should

be relied on fundamental infrastructures that SMEs

use to carry out their daily business such as emails.

The requirements analysis has revealed the need for

an open architecture, where interoperability solutions

may be installed locally, interfaced to external sys-

tems, and conﬁgured for a network of SMEs. Fur-

thermore, the main feature of such solutions is to ad-

vise people to improve their work, rather than to fully

automatically process all requests.

ICEIS 2009 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

3 EMAIL-BASED

INTEROPERABILITY SERVICE

UTILITY

We have deﬁned the Email-based Interoperability Ser-

vice Utility (EISU) inspired by the concept of Inter-

operability Service Utility (ISU) proposed by the IST

Enterprise Interoperability Research Roadmap. Our

EISU concept has the following properties:

• Accessible in Principle by all SMEs: an email-

based solution will be ”accessible” by most SMEs

as they typically use email to carry out their busi-

ness. Therefore, we can support the development

of user-centric interoperability services on top of

email communication suitable to different busi-

ness models, such as mail server installation in

company premises or through an external service

provider.

• Scalable and Almost Zero Cost: email commu-

nication is Internet-scale and is almost zero cost.

Therefore, EISU can support interoperability of

cooperative activities performed and documents

exchanged via emails (in human readable form).

EISU is easy-to-use and imposes no modiﬁcation

to the usual SME practices.

• Guaranteed Quality: the quality of interoperabil-

ity solutions is guaranteed by the reuse of the

achievements of the other research projects, by

the adoption of the available standards and by the

EISU approach, based on always available email

system.

• Not Controlled by Single Entity: This can be

achieved by ensuring that the software produced

in EISU will not be owned by a single entity (e.g.,

a company or an organization). To this end, the

EISU core will be released under an open source

software and community share-alike license.

• Supporting a Network of Cooperative Enter-

prises: EISU will enable the cooperation among

SMEs, in particular specialized SMEs. SMEs

with different skills and cultural backgrounds will

gradually approach the interoperability and co-

operate with other SMEs in order to create and

diffuse interoperability services suitable for their

business models.

With the EISU, an SME can improve its competition

by adopting business models and strengthening its co-

operation with other enterprises. ERP software ven-

dors may develop EISU modules to support interop-

erability within their platforms. E-business providers

may make available EISU modules to support inter-

operability with their clients. Our EISU is a novel

contribution to the business models for the interoper-

ability for SMEs.

4 ARCHITECTURAL OVERVIEW

OF COMMIUS

Figure 1 presents an overview of the Commius archi-

tecture which realizes the EISU concept. User tools

include tools supporting the user to perform business

tasks and to conﬁgure Commius. Commius user tools

rely on existing email tools and Web browsers and

do not require any modiﬁcation or plugins for email

tools and Web browsers. Email Gateway Plugin is re-

sponsible for intercepting and post-processing emails

relevant to businesses. Commius Modules and Mod-

ule Management include system- and business-related

modules that handle interoperability tasks to fulﬁl the

request of emails passed through the Commius. Mod-

ules in Commius are built from a rich set of compo-

nents.

System Interoperability components support func-

tionalities for achieving system interoperability, such

as providing a basic interoperability infrastructure

over SMTP to extract information from emails and

annotate emails with new information and to inte-

grate Commius with external systems in order to ac-

cess legacy/external information and services. Se-

mantic Interoperability components include compo-

nents providing functionalities for achieving seman-

tic interoperability, such as providing facilities to

achieve semantic alignment, facilitate concept negoti-

ation, and to annotate messages with meta-data to em-

bed semantics within them. Process Interoperability

components offer functionalities for supporting pro-

cess interoperability, such as features to conﬁgure

process modules, to match and adapt business pro-

cesses. Data Management components include com-

ponents providing data management facilities which

are needed by Commius. Security and Privacy com-

ponents include components providing security and

privacy infrastructure for Commius. Hosting environ-

ment is the execution environment which hosts Com-

mius components, modules and services. The core en-

tities of the Commius can interact with external sys-

tems, which are not part of the Commius. External

systems include common/speciﬁc legacy systems in

SMEs as well as other services supporting the busi-

ness of SMEs.

The architectural overview in Figure 1 describes a

single Commius system which can be deployed for a

single SME. Such a deployment can be done by the

SME itself or by a Commius service provider under

the SaaS model. Individual Commius systems can be

connected to establish a cooperative network of Com-

miuss to support a network of SMEs. The key point

of our open system is that interoperability solutions

are implemented in different components. Then, we

EMAIL-BASED INTEROPERABILITY SERVICE UTILITIES FOR COOPERATIVE SMALL AND MEDIUM

ENTERPRISES

Figure 1: Architectural overview of Email-based Interoperability Service Utility for SMEs.

develop software modules to compose components to

offer utilities required by SMEs. Our system is ex-

tensible in the sense that different components and

modules can be built and added into Commius by dif-

ferent developers and providers. Through module de-

scription and email extraction a process is used to ﬁnd

suitable modules for processing emails and the results

produced by modules will be composed to produce

suggestions to the user. Commius design is our con-

tribution to a software architecture for addressing in-

tereropability among SMEs via emails. We discuss

some main aspects of Commius architecture in the

following sections.

4.1 Matching Emails to Modules

Figure 2: Overview of handling emails in Commius.

When an email arrives, the Email Gateway Plugin

will extract metadata from the email and its attach-

ments, such as sender and receiver ids, existing Com-

mius embedded header information, and relevant key-

words. The extraction is performed by applying regu-

lar expression rules which are predeﬁned and updated

regularly. The extracted metadata, a set of keys and

values, is then enriched with other metadata related to

business activities. This enrichment is achieved by us-

ing semantic and process interoperability components

to analyze the extracted metadata.

Based on the enriched metadata, the Module Man-

ager performs a matching process to select the right

module to handle the email. This matching process

utilizes various sources of information, including ex-

tracted keywords, module description, historical data,

rules, and components, and in particular, semantic in-

formation. For example, based on pre-deﬁned rules

and metadata a module can be selected. This happens

when the user knows for sure which modules should

process which emails. When selecting a module, the

Module Manager can also interact with the user, in

case it cannot decide the right module (e.g., due to

rule conﬂict or missing information). In this case, the

Module Manager will inform the user with an email

including embedded links and by relying the email or

clicking the links, a module can be selected.

When a module is identiﬁed, the email and en-

riched metadata are forwarded to the module which

processes the request (see Section 4.2). Here, in the

matching process, the Module Manager treats mod-

ules as black boxes. Then it obtains the results from

the modules and passes the result to the Email Gate-

way Plugin which combines and prepares the result in

a right format before sending the resulting email(s) to

appropriate recipients.

ICEIS 2009 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

4.2 Business Modules and Module

Development

Business modules implement speciﬁc tasks in the

context of a deﬁned set of business processes within

a determined business domain. These modules con-

sist of a set of software components to provide the

business support as well as of a set of conﬁguration

data that sets up the components in order to operate

accordingly to the process suitable for domain needs.

A key element of our architecture is the methodology

to develop business modules which implement busi-

ness solutions. Because a business module typically

implements speciﬁc business processes of SMEs, we

need to provide generic, yet simple, mechanism to de-

velop, manage and share business modules. In our

architecture, business modules have well-deﬁned in-

terface and description provided by their developers.

Business modules utilize system, semantic and pro-

cess components to process emails not only based

on metadata but also based on business process tem-

plate/conﬁguration. Modules can be deployed and ex-

ecuted on demand through plug-in mechanisms.

Modules may also be exposed as Web services,

thus allowing them to be accessed through the Web.

This allows us to support different types of interac-

tions with the user of Commius. There are many

tasks the user will conduct via emails, which a module

can handle by processing emails, and there are tasks

where the user can simply interact with the module

through a Web browser, for example, to conﬁrm a step

while the module handling the request.

The advantage of using modules is that we sup-

port both the end user, the developer, and the provider

to use and build their solutions. For example, the

provider can implement a module and specify mod-

ule description and business process templates guid-

ing the operation of the module; or the developer can

simply use an existing module but provide new busi-

ness process templates. The end user may just need

to obtain modules and change module conﬁguration

and business process templates suitable for his/her en-

vironments. Thus, business objectives are achieved

through the implementation of modules and/or the

conﬁguration of business process templates.

4.3 User Interactions

For SMEs end users, easy-to-use tools are critical.

First, we assist the user to select suitable modules to

execute requests coming from emails. This includes

the selection of the right modules, the conﬁguration

of the interface between Commius and user’s external

systems, and the sematic mapping of business docu-

ments. Second, we provide tools to assist the end-

users to perform their business carried out by business

modules. Examples of supporting tools for assist-

ing the end-user to perform their business are a Task

Recommendation Tool to recommend relevant human

tasks in a process and provide extra information for a

task, and a Task Tracking Tool allowing a user to track

performed steps in a running/ﬁnished process and to

directly embed user history or useful process informa-

tion into an Commius enhanced email.

The key beneﬁt that Commius brings to the users

is to support them to simplify their business by en-

riching emails with hints and recommendations with-

out any change made in mail clients or Web browsers.

By exploiting system, semantic and process interop-

erabilities features, Commius enriches emails with

business-related information, such as preparing tem-

plates for order conﬁrmation, tracking information,

and payments. Enriched information is embedded

into emails that can be accessed via external links.

5 SUPPORT SME COOPERATION

The Commius also supports a network of coopera-

tive SMEs by extending individual Commius systems

to a trusted network of cooperative SMEs. Within a

network of cooperative Commius-based SMEs, each

company utilizes its own Commius system, hosted

in its infrastructure or provided by an SaaS provider.

Based on agreements in the network, security and pri-

vacy policies are established to ensure that a company

can send some requests to another company.

5.1 Semantic Understanding

As email-based business requests are ﬂexible, we can-

not assume that everyone communicating with the

company will follow speciﬁc formats or indeed that

they use Commius. This motivated our proposed

peer-to-peer shared documents approach of which the

basic idea is to focus on the information within the

documents rather than their actual syntax. To do this

we use: (i) a set of standardized tokens represent-

ing atomic items of information which can be found

within a document, (ii) a set of rules for pulling these

tokens out of documents, and (iii) a set of local docu-

ment types deﬁned in terms of the information tokens.

The basic approach is then to take an incom-

ing document, identify what information tokens it

contains and hence identify the closest matching lo-

cal document type(s) and insert the information into

these. In the peer-to-peer document sharing, each

Commius deployment includes an initial set of infor-

EMAIL-BASED INTEROPERABILITY SERVICE UTILITIES FOR COOPERATIVE SMALL AND MEDIUM

ENTERPRISES

mation tokens and rules for identifying these. Each

company then uses these tokens to deﬁne its local

document types. When an SME receives a document

(e.g., a purchase order) via email it tries to map it to

a local document type in order to understand it in the

company’s own terms. If it cannot map it then the

Commius in that company contacts the Commius in

the sender company to ﬁnd a common semantic un-

derstanding of the information continaed in the doc-

ument. Upon agreement, the Commius performs the

mapping using possibly a new document type.

5.2 Cooperative Business Activities

We develop a peer-to-peer model for cooperative ac-

tivities that supports companies in the same network

to assist each other in answering requests from the

user. When a user of an SME sends a request, the

SME’s Commius system might not be able to solve

the request. In this case, the SME can use the coop-

erative network to ﬁnd other SMEs which can solve

the request. The peer-to-peer model for cooperative

activities works on the assumption that each Com-

mius deployment includes rules and user interactions

for identifying when a request should be forwarded to

another SMEs. Such rules are updated over the time

based on business exchange within the network and

are based on the trust degree among SMEs. Rules can

be used to (semi-)automatically forward emails or to

create a new request based on an existing one and to

ask for approval from the user. Based on speciﬁc con-

ﬁguration, an SME receiving a request from another

SME in the network might treat the request in a dif-

ferent way with a request from its own user.

6 RELATED WORK

Various projects have connected email to knowledge

or context-sensitive information, such as Xobni

(http://www.xobni.com), kMail (Schwartz and Teeni,

2000) and Zimbra (http://www.zimbra.com), but

they aims at supporting human collaboration, rather

than enterprise interoperability. Another major

research direction is to address task management in

emails, such as visualization of complex corporate

collaboration (Wattenberg et al., 2005), recognization

of relations between messages (Bellotti et al., 2003),

social proﬁles and network (Whittaker et al., 2004),

users’ email behavior (Horvitz et al., 1999), and ﬁling

messages (Segal and Kephart, 1999). In particular,

(Wattenberg et al., 2005) presents lesson learned in

using email supports for corporate collaborations,

but it does not address cooperative activities among

enterprises. There are also various commercial efforts

atop email for business, such as collective knowledge

gathering in MarkMail (http://markmail.org/), and

prioritizing emails in Attent solution from Seriosity

(http://www.seriosity.com/attent.html). However,

one major problem is that many of these systems

involved the development of new standalone clients -

forcing people to switch to new software and change

their work practices. A second problem is that these

systems were often not well integrated with users’

external/legacy systems (e.g., their ﬁle system or

company databases).

Recently, there is also ongoing research on ex-

tracting information and knowledge, its management,

social network analysis, and topic discovery from

emails, such as in the introduction of the Enter-

prise track within the series of TREC conferences

(http://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec14/t14 proceedings.html)

and the Nepomuk project (http:// nepo-

muk.semanticdesktop.org). However, supports

of business interoperability as what Commius intends

for SMEs are missing.

Various process interoperability techniques have

been developed, such as the projects ATHENA

(http:// www.modelbased.net/aif/index.html) and

INTEROP (http://interop-vlab.eu). The results of

these projects can be used within Commius to sup-

port a business driven visualization of collaborative

processes and business process interoperability for

SMEs.

7 CONCLUSIONS

In this paper, we have presented an Email-based In-

teroperability Service Utility (EISU) for cooperative

SMEs. Based on that, we have designed the Com-

mius architecture which includes main components

and modules for realizing EISU and discussed pos-

sible customization and deployments of Commius for

networks of cooperative SMEs. Currently, we utilize

existing security protocols. The privacy and business

compliance is an ongoing work. The implementation

of Commius is currently on progress and we expect to

have the ﬁrst prototype released in Summer 2009.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank all our colleagues in Commius for their

contributions. The research reported in this paper is

funded by the EU under the FP7 Commius project.

ICEIS 2009 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

100

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