Standards-based application integration for business-to-business communications

Sammanfattning: Fiercecompetitions and pursuits of excellence require all applications,internal or external, to be integrated for business-to-businesscommunications. Standards play an important role in fulfilling therequirement. This dissertation focuses on Business-to-Businessstandards or XML-based frameworks for Internet commerce. First, we analyse what the standards are and how they interact.Fifteen influential standards are selected: eCo Framework, ebXML,UBL, UDDI, SOAP, WSDL, RosettaNet, Open Applications Group,VoiceXML, cXML, Wf-XML, OFX, ICE, RDF, and OWL. Basically eachstandard has to provide transport mechanisms and message structuresfor general and/or specific applications. In terms of messagestructure definition, they can be classified as two types:syntax-based, for defining messages syntactically andsemantics-based, like RDF and OWL for defining messagessemantically. Second, for transiting from syntax to semantics, we provide areuse-based method to develop the ontology by reusing existingXML-based standards. This is a kind of knowledge reuse, forinstance, using previously developed structures, naming conventionsand relationships between concepts. Third, we exploit how to use these standards. We propose anapproach that combines RDF and OWL with SOAP for building semanticWeb services. Three levels of combinations are provided: SimpleReference, Direct Embedment, and Semantic SOAP. Fourth, we design an infrastructure aimed at creating a formalchannel by using Web services and semantic Web for establishingbuyer awareness, i.e., buyers first become aware ofproducts/promotions offered by sellers. We propose the concept ofpersonal ontology, emphasizing that ontology is not only a commonand shared conceptualization but also can be used to specifypersonal views of the products by sellers and buyers. Theagreements between buyers and sellers can be described in XMLschema or ontology in OWL. A semantic matchmaking algorithm isdesigned and implemented considering synonym, polysemy and partialmatching.