Objetivo
The basic goal of the present ABILITIES (Application Bus for InteroperabiLITy In enlarged Europe SMEs) proposal is to study, design and develop a federated architecture implemented by a set of intelligent and adaptive UBL active messages (an Application Bus for EAI) and basic interoperability services, aiming at supporting SMEs EAI in e-commerce contexts, specifically in less developed Countries and less RTD intensive industrial sectors.
In particular, ABILITIES will address three research streams:
- Orientation towards Enlarged Europe SMEs: starting from OASIS's UBL specifications define a generic XML interchange format for business documents for order-to-invoice;
- Federated Architecture and Intelligent Business Documents: provide support for the architecture that ISO 14258 (International Standard prepared by Technical Committee 184) identifies as federated (on-the-fly reconciliation and mapping negotiation, as no reference meta-model can be developed). Also in the presence of a reference meta-model for order-to-invoice business documents (UBL), ABILITIES will experiment an innovative blended architecture which could join message-based Service Oriented Architectures and Intelligent Multi-Agent Systems;
- Service Orchestration and Business Process support: Study and provide reconciliation between research and standards in business documents and research and standards in business process management.
In addition, ABILITIES will test and validate such technologies in real-life SMEs-driven business scenarios located in New Member States and implement:
- Collaborative business work scenarios for Retail SMEs in Lithuania;
- Business process development and interconnection for High-Tech SMEs in Slovakia;
- Mobile and ubiquitous work support in Agro-food SMEs networks in Turkey;
- e-business Document exchange for the Textile-Clothing SMEs supply chain in Romania;
- Semantic content reconciliation for Tourism SMEs in Hungary.