Integrating business software
As an alternative to creating many separate enterprise applications, integration is the new direction for software development. An EU-funded project is helping to make the process easier. The EMPOWER project set out to develop technologies enabling European software small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to integrate and manage 'loosely-coupled' commercial off-the-shelf software applications. This goal translated to three main research targets. The project aimed to: develop innovative, enabling technologies, evaluate and validate its research results, and facilitate the uptake of project results. The project's work relied on adaptation of semantic web service frameworks, which means a universal standard for machine-readable web data. Specifically, the project's work applied to e-business processes and transactions. EMPOWER listed six main areas of ambitions related to technical aspects of software design and functionality. All deliverables were completed according to the revised project agreement with the European Commission, though the detailed achievements were not stated. The project's legacy will be a flexible architecture for facilitating standardised creation of interoperable business applications. This will lead to better information management and aggregation, and improvements in business services.
Keywords
Business, e-commerce, software, integration, semantic web-service framework
