About ORBI

Motivation

The globalization of everyday business and increasing international trade are leading to a growing need to improve national and international business collaborations and transactions. Emerging technologies for e-business transactions allow for new methods of process, data and application integration. Thus, business processes today commonly require electronic transactions between business partners. But business partners almost always have different ways to organize the information needed to run the business, in terms of content, syntax and semantics. Consequences are mismatch and misunderstanding in electronic transactions. Too often, this ends in a disruption of the electronic information chain and thus leads to negative cost, time and quality effects. Process, information and application integration thus become a challenge for the sustaining of international trade and business development.

Data and application integration is not at all a new task. EDI projects have been run since many years. But conventional application and data integration projects - like EDI projects - deal with static integration problems. In such projects, it is assumed that data and application structures do not change during and after completion of the integration project. However, with business processes, information structures or application functions showing higher dynamics - e.g. in the context of electronic market transactions - this approach does not lead to satisfactory results.

Past approaches have often been comprehensive. The development of and agreement upon a universal standard is then an intended aim when dealing with semantic reference systems. Many consortiums and initiatives subscribe to this aim. For exactly this reason, however, the aim proves impracticable. Other initiatives have tried to create a universal super-standard by merging existing standards into one. But because of the sheer number of existing and evolving standards and their dynamically changing nature, such comprehensive approaches have failed regularly.

 

Objectives

The general objective of the project is to develop methods and application components for semantic e-business integration. We identify ontology management and engineering techniques as an appropriate means for meeting this objective. Information structures and standards for electronic business integration can be perceived as domain ontologies, as they contain domain knowledge in a structured form. Using ontologies and ontological engineering techniques, semantic references between information both on the structure and content level can be established.

Thus the project analyses what ontology management can do for process, information and application integration under dynamic e-business conditions. Up to now, ontology management and the semantic web have been intensively researched on, but have rarely been applied to business practice. In the project we not only analyse research results and develop novel methods and frameworks, but also apply them to build business use application components that are deployed as web services. Methods and services developed support dynamic information integration by using semi-automated ontology referencing. The self-learning synchronization system that is built uses methods of ontological engineering and artificial intelligence and thus allows integration projects without initial ramp-up cost.

Basis

The project research is based on the results of the previous research projects MultiNeg and SemaVar. The joint project findings are the next logical steps to be taken towards realization of an integrated information process chain in electronic business development.