Business to business interoperability: A current review of XML data integration standards

Computer Standards & Interfaces 31 (2009) 1045–1055

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Computer Standards & Interfaces j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w. e l s ev i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / c s i

Business to business interoperability: A current review of XML data integration standards Fenareti Lampathaki ⁎, Spiros Mouzakitis, George Gionis, Yannis Charalabidis, Dimitris Askounis National Technical University of Athens, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Heroon Polytechniou 9, 15773 Zografou, Athens, Greece

a r t i c l e

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Article history: Received 6 April 2008 Received in revised form 26 October 2008 Accepted 7 December 2008 Available online 24 December 2008 Keywords: Data integration Standards evaluation taxonomy UBL OAGIS CCTS

a b s t r a c t Despite the dawn of the XML era, semantic interoperability issues still remain unsolved. As various initiatives trying to address how the underlying business information should be modelled, named and structured are being realised throughout the world, the importance of moving towards a holistic approach in eBusiness magnifies. In this paper, an attempt to clarify between the standards prevailing in the area is performed and the XML Data Standards providing generic XML Schemas are presented. Based on this “XML Data Standards Map”, a multi-faceted classification mechanism is proposed, leading to an extensible taxonomy of standards. A set of facets is analyzed for each standard, allowing for their classification based on their scope, completeness, compatibility with other standards, openness, ability to modify the schemas and maturity, to name a few. Through populating and querying this multi-faceted classification, a common understanding of Data Integration Standards can be ensured and the choice of a standard according to the requirements of each business can be systematically addressed. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Contents 1. 2. 3. 4.

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Literature review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Primer of the Data Modelling concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Core technologies in data modelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1. W3C ΧΜL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2. UN/CEFACT CCTS (ISO 15000-5) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5. XML Data Standards providing generic B2B Schemas . . . . . . . . . . 5.1. cXML . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2. eBIS-XML . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3. OAGIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4. UBL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5. XBRL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.6. xCBL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6. Multi-facet evaluation taxonomy for XML data standards . . . . . . . . 7. Populating the multi-facet evaluation taxonomy for XML data standards . 8. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1. Introduction ⁎ Corresponding author. Tel.: +30 210 772 2078; fax: +30 210 772 3550. E-mail address: fl[email protected] (F. Lampathaki). 0920-5489/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.csi.2008.12.006

Data modelling issues have aroused the interest of the research community since the late 1960s when EDI (Electronic Data Interchange)

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that facilitated the application-to-application exchange of standard business documents between companies, independently of software, hardware, and communication networks, was introduced. With the exponential growth of the Web that opened new opportunities for businesses to transact across all types of boundaries (geographical, national, business category, etc.), early research had focused on providing a lingua franca for B2B e-Commerce, XML, that went beyond HTML to reflect the richness of the data being published. In progress of time eBusiness modelling frameworks went through an evolutionary path from monolithic and proprietary standards (e.g. TRADACOMS [32] for the UK retail industry, ANSI ASC X.12 [1] in North America and the United Nationsrecommended UN/EDIFACT [33]) towards flexible and standardized XMLbased stacks covering the requirements from different industries. It had been a common belief that creating XML vocabularies was sufficient to achieve data interoperability, yet this assumption goes far beyond reality. XML by itself does not guarantee that XML expressed business information exchanged in the span of business processes across different enterprises will be understood equally well by all systems. This is because the XML syntax only provides for creating markup languages used as metadata, it does not address how the underlying business information must be modelled, named and structured. Semantics come to cover this gap by attaching meaning to data in a structured and technical way that both humans and machines can understand and process. The difficulty however is that currently most modelling languages focus almost exclusively on the technical aspects of creating the model rather than the semantic aspects necessary for true interoperability. Many industry-specific consortia, like CIDX [47], PIDX [48], OAGi [23], and RosettaNet [49], have indeed solved major technical issues of traditional EDI, but appear insufficient to provide a common understanding of the underlying data and arrange the semantics of the business information. The prevalent “business standards dilemma”, defined as the diversity of standards that address particular data requirements, but are designed on such a different basis that make the choice of a specific standard to be adopted a new challenge, is compounding the problem [15,29]. For example, trading partners have to deal with several standards at the same time and, since only recently a methodology for standardizing business semantics (ISO 15000-5, commonly known as UN/CEFACT Core Component Technical Specification) has emerged, careful analysis — on the part of the developer to ensure correct understanding and interpretation, mapping and integration between interfaces is required incurring great expense. As long as the semantic discourse of data and standards exists, a holistic approach in e-Business cannot be achieved [27]. In this context, the present paper is oriented towards analyzing the Data Modelling State of the Art in terms of core technologies, like XML and UN/CEFACT CCTS (Core Components Technical Specification), and international standards and initiatives in Data Modelling, that have produced sets of XML Schemas, like xCBL, eBIS-XML, OAGIS, UBL, XBRL and xCBL. Such standards fall into the same jurisdiction and try to address data integration issues with the adoption of semanticallyenabled XML Schemas. With regard to the fact that generic classifications of standards (e.g. International Classification of Standards [18]) do not serve the exact needs of the selection and evaluation of data modelling standards; they merely list different standards, a conceptual framework that takes the form of a multi-faceted taxonomy has been developed for the systematic evaluation of standards. The first version of the proposed evaluation framework was developed in the context of the EU-funded “GENESIS: Enterprise Application Interoperability via Internet-Integration for SMEs, Governmental Organizations and Intermediaries in the New European Union” Project [12]. Its aim is the research, development and pilot application of the needed methodologies, infrastructure and software components that will allow the typical, usually small and medium, European enterprise to conduct its Business transactions over Internet, by interconnecting its main transactional software

applications and systems with those of collaborating enterprises (B2B transactions), governmental bodies (B2G transactions), banking and insurance institutions (BNK transactions) with respect to the EC current legal and regulatory status and the existing one in the new EU, candidate and associate countries. The development of the evaluation framework was due to a practical need faced in the project [11]: there were many potential data modelling standards and available specifications, and the need to evaluate and select those that would serve each integration need (i.e. B2B, B2G and BNK) emerged. In addition, it was not always clear, which transactions could be covered by the proposed models, standards and specifications and it quickly became evident that there was no evaluation model in the bibliography that would consider all the needed aspects. In this context, a data modelling evaluation framework was developed and used both for a quick overview of several data modelling standards and a more thorough evaluation of a selected core related to the scope of the project. This paper proposes an extended version of the GENESISrelated evaluation framework that provides the means for the systematic analysis of any B2B data standard and for deducting conclusions regarding the most appropriate standard according to the weight each business poses to the criteria — facets. The set of parameters and characteristics of the standards indicatively include scope, completeness, openness, modularity, maturity, configuration support and modelling of messages and aim to provide a thorough understanding of the standard before implementation. Our approach also presents innovative aspects by incorporating for the first time facets, such as integrated management of enterprise and data models, cross-country support, support for rules modelling, workflow capabilities incorporated into the documents and compatibility with other standards, in the standards' evaluation phase. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: in the second section related work in literature is reviewed and discussed. An introduction on Data Modelling is given in Section 3. Section 4 proceeds with the core technologies in Data Modelling. The presentation of the XML Data Integration Standards providing generic (not industry-specific) B2B XML Schemas and the taxonomy of the standards follow in Sections 5 and 6 and lead to the evaluation of standards in Section 7. A short summary of our results and further research activities required towards the next generation of enterprise data integration complement this work. 2. Literature review In the span of this work related research efforts which reference Business Information and Data Integration and Modelling [2–4,6,7,10,17,19–21,26,28,30,31,38,45,46,50] were examined and reviewed. The main findings upon which our approach builds originate from the following relevant work: • In [20], a state of the art in e-Business Frameworks that are suitable for industrial procurement, design, production or distribution and were active in 2004 is presented. The frameworks under scrutiny are: BPEL, BPML, CIDX (Chemical Industry Data Exchange), cXML, ebXML, OAGIS, papiNet, PIDX (Petroleum Industry Data Exchange), RosettaNet, UBL, xCBL and XPDL (XML Process Definition Language). Key variables related to the properties and standardization of the ebusiness frameworks are also identified and depending on the values assigned to the variables a basis for analyzing the commonalities, differences and regularities between them has been created. • In [38], XEDI, CBL, cXML, ebXML, RosettaNet, IFX, OFX, FPML, FinXML, IDEAlliance, HL7, HR-XML and OAGIS are listed as XML/EDI standards for business communication. • The main issues and solutions to B2B e-Commerce interactions are surveyed and the dimensions for evaluating B2B interaction frameworks are proposed in [3]. A representative set of XML-based B2B interaction frameworks including xCBL, BizTalk, cXML, RosettaNet and ebXML is also presented.

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• eCo, RosettaNet, BizTalk, cXML and MESChain are considered as B2B interoperability frameworks in [2] and are compared on the basis of criteria like purpose, catalogue support, service discovery and document conversion. • An overview of eCo, RosettaNet, BizTalk and e-speak in terms of their support for service discovery, brokering, negotiation, mediation, billing, payment, composition and security is provided in [6]. • In [46], a survey of the architecture and message definition of BizTalk, cXML, eCo Framework, ICE (Information and Content Exchange), IOTP (Internet Open Trading Protocol), OAG (Open Applications Group), RosettaNet, xCBL, ebXML and ontology.org takes place. • According to [28], the list of currently used (typically XML-based) B2B standards include UN/EDIFACT, UN/CEFACT, eBIS-XML, ebXML, RosettaNet, xCBL, XBRL, GCI, OAGIS and UBL. The analysis of the above standards was based on the ISO/IEC 9126-1 Software Product Quality model adapted to a set of criteria specific to B2B transaction processing systems. • In [45], a categorization of ebXML, RosettaNet, xCBL, UN/CEFACT, UN/EDIFACT, XBRL and eBIS-XML according to whether their main focus is on business processes/message transactions or on business documents is performed. An evaluation framework based on the main objectives of the PRAXIS system, like PRAXIS Goals, expansiveness, ease of implementation, compatibility, support, maturity and licensing, is proposed. • In [30], an outline of the traditional EDI/EDIFACT, RosettaNet and the upcoming UN/CEFACT stack is provided leading to their comparison on the basis of a set of benchmark criteria, like horizontal integration, flexibility, maturity, common repository/dictionary, comprehensiveness of stack, ease of implementation and degree of dissemination. • The paper [26] focuses on inter-company business-to-business (B2B) integration analyzing its benefits and costs. The most used B2B integration framework standards, i.e. EDI ASC X12 and EDIFACT, RosettaNet, ebXML, Web Services and OAGIS are examined, while the convergences between RosettaNet and ebXML, ebXML and OAGIS, RosettaNet and OAGIS are studied. • XML-based e-Business frameworks supporting industrial procurement, design, production or distribution, which were active in 2003, are presented in [21], while the most important XML-based e-Business frameworks are compared in more detail, i.e. cXML, OAGIS and xCBL are included because they are pioneers in XML-based supply-chain integration, papiNet and RosettaNet are of interest because Finnish companies have been involved in their development, while BPML, ebXML and XPDL provide a new insight into the use of XML. • In [50], the B2B standards are classified in three categories: “business event B2B standards” if they describe messages that have a certain intent and are interpreted as events that cause action in back-end systems (BizTalk, cXML, EDI, fPML, GISB, OAGIS, OBI, OTA, RosettaNet, SWIFT, xCBL), “syndication B2B standards” when a trading partner would like to retrieve information from several back-end system as sources of information (ICE, RSS) and “supporting standards” that support the development of B2B standards although they can be used in other developments, too (Beep, ebXML, gXML, S2ML, SOAP, tpaml, UDDI, WSDL, xkml, XML, XML Schema, XML-RPC, XP). • Standards are grouped into three areas: foundation technology standards, marketplace standards, and commerce services and applications in [4]. A comparison among e-Business architectures, like EDI, WWW, e-Procurement, B2B hubs and Web Services, is conducted on the basis of market reach by sellers, entity that sets data and transaction standards, rigor of data and transaction standards and index mechanism for discovery services. A main emerging conclusion from the relevant work analysis is that in the area of data integration standardization for inter-organizational business processes, terminology confusion is emerging and the meaning of the concept “standard” is not as clear as most people and organizations seem to assume. For example, the same standards are characterized as

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eBusiness stacks in [30], B2B interaction standards in [3] and e-business frameworks in [21]. Efforts to compare standards that fall within different context and/or have different philosophy are also observed. In this paper, in alignment with Nurmilaakso et al. [20], an ebusiness framework is defined as a standard that answers or gives means to answering the questions of what information should be shared, when and how within and between companies. It is a thorough solution that provides the means to define the business documents, the business processes and the messaging and collaboration mechanism. According to this paper, ebXML and RosettaNet can be considered as e-Business Frameworks. A standard on the contrary according to [9] is a “Document, established by consensus by a recognised body, that provides, for common and repeated use, rules, guidelines or characteristics for activities and their results, aimed at the achievement of the optimum degree of order in a given context. Standards should be based on the consolidated results of science, technology and experience, and aimed at the promotion of optimum community benefits.” To this direction, in this paper B2B Data Modelling and Integration standards define the format and semantics of messages (e.g., request for quote), components (including Data Types) and documents taking part in the execution of a business transaction. 3. Primer of the Data Modelling concept In computer science, Data Modelling is considered as the process of structuring and organizing data. While data analysis is a common term for data modelling, the activity actually has more in common with the ideas and methods of synthesis (inferring general concepts from particular instances) than it does with analysis (identifying component concepts from more general ones). It strives to bring the data structures of interest together into a cohesive, inseparable whole by eliminating unnecessary data redundancies and by relating data structures with relationships. In [16], the objectivist approach based on entities specifies data models as mirrors of reality while the subjectivist or rule-based approach views data modeling as formalizing the meaning of messages which are to be exchanged. Data Modelling is not an optional task since no database has ever been built without a model, yet its scope today needs to extend to how data is transferred and semantically conceived apart from stored in a database. To this direction, Data Modelling in this paper is perceived as the methodologically standardized description of the data stored and communicated in typical transactions of businesses, in order to ensure the seamless integration of their information systems. The result of applying a data model is the development of a schema, which formally represents a “Universe of Discourse” (UoD). Taking into account the Document Engineering Roadmap in [25] and adapting the levels at [13] for databases, data models exist at multiple levels including: • The Conceptual Data Model describes data from an abstract yet semantically-enriched point of view. It includes ontologies, classes and their attributes. • The Logical Data Model provides more details than the conceptual data model and creates the data structures that will be exchanged during the transactions. It includes core components, the individual pieces of information, and the XML Schemas with which the XML data files transferred comply. • The Physical Data Model describes the storage of data in a physical relational database. It is the blueprint for database schemas. The architecture of our layered data model is motivated by a top-down approach that encourages modelers: First, to ask WHY things work and to look at the concepts and the semantics behind the data. Second, to progress to a more logical model by recognizing WHAT data needs to be transferred and its structure. Third, to create physical models that reflect HOW data is stored.

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Fig. 1. Data Modelling Granularity Levels.

In our conception for Data Modelling, different granularities of data representation can be identified and separated, as illustrated in Fig. 1. Well-engineered data schemas at each level have clear, unambiguous definitions of atoms, a recognition of the logical sets (or objects) in which they belong and the way these sets can be combined to form collections. These definitions allow us to minimize redundancy, localize dependencies and ensure that information can be maintained in models that reflect the constraints of the real world. In this paper, emphasis is laid at the logical layer and in particular to the core technologies (XML and CCTS) as well as XML Data Standards that second the design of logical data models. 4. Core technologies in data modelling 4.1. W3C ΧΜL The Extensible Markup Language (XML) [41] is a W3C-recommended general-purpose markup language for creating specialpurpose markup languages, capable of describing many different kinds of data. It is a simplified subset of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML — ISO 8879:1986) and by construction, XML documents are conforming SGML documents. Originally designed to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing, the primary purpose of XML is to facilitate the sharing of data across different systems, particularly systems connected via the internet. XML is the basis for defining data interchange standards. There are three levels of abstraction related to XML: (1) XML definition language as the meta-language to formally define new markup languages, (2) XML DTD or XSD file used to validate XML documents in order to ensure the data integrity, and (3) XML document, which represents the actual application data or documents. Additional supporting standards such as XSL, XML DOM or Simple API for XML (SAX) are required to use XML in applications. The specification XML 1.0 was issued in 1998 and today it is in its fourth edition (2006). XML is framed by a set of technologies and standards that complement it: XML Schema, XSL and XSLT, XML Signature, XML Encryption, XML Query, XPath, XLink, CSS, DOM, SAX, XML Namespace, as well as a set of other associated standards and tools under development. XML Schema [42–44] has been proposed by W3C since 2001 as the successor of DTDs that allows for more detailed constraints on an XML document's logical structure. XML Schemas are often referred to in terms

of the initialism for XML Schema instances, XSD (XML Schema Definition). In general, XML Schemas are XML documents that define the structure of other XML documents. The advantage they offer is that they can be processed (e.g. add or remove elements) like any other XML document. 4.2. UN/CEFACT CCTS (ISO 15000-5) The UN/CEFACT (United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business) Core Component solution presents a methodology for developing a common set of semantic building blocks that represent the general types of business data in use today and provides for the creation of new business vocabularies and restructuring of existing ones. In particular, it defines meta models and rules necessary for describing the structure and contents of conceptual and physical/logical data models, process models, and information exchange models. The UN/ CEFACT Core Components Technical Specification established in November 2003 (Version 2.01) [34] covers two significant areas: the Core Components and the Business Information Entities [14]. The purpose of using Core Components as part of the ebXML framework is to ensure that two trading partners using different syntaxes (e.g. Extensible Markup Language (XML) and United Nations/EDI for Administration, Commerce, and Transport (UN/ EDIFACT)) are using Business Semantics in the same way on condition that both syntaxes have been based on the same Core Components. This enables clean mapping between disparate message definitions across syntaxes, industry and regional boundaries. In fact, the CCTS methodology is comparable with the syntax (grammar) rules of a human language. However, CCTS not only provides the grammar rules, it also defines a methodology for creating unambiguous building blocks that can be understood and interpreted by humans and machines in the same way. The Core Component Technology achieves this by using the following key concepts for the development of business data: • Logical modelling of objects, which is comparable to the logical composition of paragraphs, business letters, articles or even books. • Naming convention that is a set of grammar rules that govern the formulation of the names of business data elements. • The context for giving the correct meaning of the business data, e.g. geopolitical region, industry, business process or official constraints. • Syntax neural semantic information that can seamlessly be transformed into various kinds of technical representations without any information loss.

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The Core Component Technical Specification also considers the following standard components: • Syntax Neutral Core Data Types, which are the smallest and most generic pieces of information in a business data model. Core Data Types are an intermediate data type that are a level above primitive types, such as Decimal, String, Boolean, Binary and Numeric. • Context Categories. CCTS defines eight unique and orthogonal context categories — i.e. business process, product classification, industry classification, geopolitical, official constraints, business process role, supporting role, system capabilities — which define the circumstances in which a business collaboration or data use takes place. Since modularity in schema design promotes reuse and provides significant management capabilities, UN/CEFACT has accordingly defined the UN/CEFACT modularity model which includes a number of schema modules to support this approach. To this direction, the UN/ CEFACT Naming and Design Rules (NDR) [37] also define a set of guidelines for transforming CCTS-based artifacts into XML Schema and XML-based instances. Such Naming Conventions are necessary to gain consistency in naming and defining Core Components, Data Types and Business Information Entities. The resulting consistency facilitates comparison during the discovery and analysis process, and precludes ambiguity, such as the development of multiple Core Components with different names that have the same semantic meaning. The UN/CEFACT Core Component Library (UN/CCL) [35] represents the repository for generic business data components, the so called Core Components. Based on the experiences gained in previous data standardization efforts, the CCL does not provide pre-determined, static or industry-specific data definitions, but comprises a huge set of contextagnostic, generally valid data templates (e.g. postal address, personal information) that are syntax-independent and represent the general business data entities which are commonly used in today's business processes. UN/CEFACT has defined a set of primary rules for the customization of UN/CCL artifacts. 5. XML Data Standards providing generic B2B Schemas This section introduces the industry independent XML Data Standards, namely xCBL, eBIS-XML, OAGIS, UBL, XBRL and xCBL, that will populate the proposed evaluation framework. The presentation order for the Standards is based on their alphabetical order while the information provided is primarily based on the specifications and information published in their official web sites until June 2007. To our knowledge, UN/CEFACT has also released an International eInvoice (Cross-Industry electronic Invoice — CII) [36] designed for use by the Steel, Automotive, or Electronic industries, as well as in the retail sector or Customs and other Government Authorities. However, since its schemas were published in draft version in April 2007 without relevant documentation, it was not included in this study.

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Title

commerce eXtensible Markup Language (cXML) [5]

Main features

The latest standard version (1.2.017) issued in April 2007 includes documents for setup (company details and transaction profiles), catalogue content, application integration (including the widely-used PunchOut feature), original, change and delete purchase orders and responses to all of these requests, order confirmation and ship notice documents (cXML analogues of EDI 855 and 856 transactions) and invoice documents. Despite the fact that cXML is extensible (in the sense that if business relationships require more information than cXML supports intrinsically, that data may still be sent end-to-end) and regularly updated, the use of DTDs instead of W3C XML Schemas constrains potential wider acceptance and adoption of the standard.

Future prospects

5.2. eBIS-XML

Title

eBIS-XML [8]

Organization/ Business Application Software Developers Association (BASDA), representing company more than 300 of the world's leading applications software developers Purpose To provide a XML-based standard, with which business and financial performance information will be defined and exchanged Brief BASDA uses the W3C XML Standard as the basis for its message structure. It description uses the W3C XML Schema, rather than DTD (Data Type Definition), as the means of defining the specification for the message and the validation, while e-mail is the common delivery mechanism. The standard messages are designed in the form of 'schemas' which allow large corporate accounting systems, like SAP, to communicate with small business systems such as TAS Books. Furthermore, if the messages are received by systems which are not eBIS-XML enabled or the organization does not have accounting software, they can simply be displayed and printed out as documents. Therefore, a company does not need to know if its supplier or customer is eBIS-XML enabled before it sends an eBIS-XML order or invoice. Main The eBIS-XML suite (Version 3.09 — March 2004) includes the following features documents (the items marked with an (⁎) have been developed but are not in use): Web content order (punch-out), Web sales order, eCatalogues⁎, Account information⁎, Product information⁎, Pricing information⁎, Stock availability⁎, Purchase order, Order acknowledgement, Delivery note, Proforma invoice, Invoice, Batch file trailer, Customer statement⁎, Remittance Advice, VAT Form 100⁎, VAT Intrastat⁎, Payment⁎. A key requirement in making the BASDA eBIS-XML suite interoperable has been to enable a user to edit the information before it is posted into the receiving system, which is the process that is normally used for paper-based orders and invoices. They are processed manually and, when the order or the invoice looks acceptable, it is then posted into the accounting software. Similarly when the BASDA eBIS-XML order or invoice message is received, the receiving system will read as much information as it can into the order entry screen and then allow the operator to edit or enter key information like part numbers, customer account numbers, etc before finally posting the order and invoice. Future Despite the facts that the BASDA eBIS-XML suite of messages has been prospects piloted as a possible method of eProcurement for all Government departments in the United Kingdom and BASDA has set up a testing and certification service to ensure that the eBIS-XML messages are compatible with each other, the standard appears not to be flexible enough to effectively support typical business's requirements.

5.1. cXML 5.3. OAGIS Title

commerce eXtensible Markup Language (cXML) [5]

Organization/ company Purpose Brief description

Collaboration of 52 major companies To provide formal XML DTD schemas for standard business transactions cXML (commerce eXtensible Markup Language) is a streamlined protocol intended for consistent communication of business documents between procurement applications, e-commerce hubs and suppliers. It is a protocol that is published for free on the Internet along with its DTD, since each cXML document is constructed based on XML Document Type Definitions (DTDs). The protocol does not include the full breadth of interactions some parties may wish to communicate, yet through the use of Extrinsic elements and newly-defined domains for various identifiers it is easily expanded by such applications. (continued on next page)

Title

Open Applications Group Integration Specification (OAGIS) [23]

Organization/ company Purpose Brief description

Open Applications Group, Inc. (OAGi) To provide a standard for business software interoperability The Open Applications Group Integration Specification (OAGIS) is an effort to provide a canonical business language for information integration dated back in the fall of 1995. It uses XML as the common alphabet for defining business messages, and for identifying business processes (scenarios) that allow businesses and business applications to communicate. OAGIS is a complete set of XML business messages, and also accommodates the additional requirements of specific industries by partnering with various vertical industry groups. (continued on next page)

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Title

Open Applications Group Integration Specification (OAGIS) [23]

Brief description

OAGIS provides the definition of business messages in the form of Business Object Documents (BODs) and a set of example business scenarios that provide example usages of the BODs. The business scenarios identify the business applications and components being integrated and the BODs that are used. OAGIS (Version 9.1 — May 2007) currently includes 434 Business Object Documents fulfilling the need for the definition of business objects in eCommerce, Finance, Manufacturing, Logistics, Customer Relationship Management and Enterprise Resource Planning systems. Everything in OAGIS though begins with the business process. OAGIS in its latest version has adopted UN/CEFACT/ISO CCTS version 2.01 and has included the approved harmonized Core Components from UN/CEFACT TBG 17 (Core Component Harmonization work group). OAGIS has also made enhancements to provide better web services support and has issued guidelines for WSDL that can be used to develop Web services. Because of the need for flexibility, OAGIS 9.1 has been designed with the ability to “plug-in” industry vertical content, constraints, and terminology through the use of an OAGIS Overlay. Due to its long history of delivering quality usable integration standards, OAGIS is supported by application vendors and implementation providers, and has been implemented by various customers in over 40 countries worldwide. By adopting latest methodologies in Data Modelling (i.e. CCTS) and releasing frequently new versions, it keeps up to pace with advancements and consolidates its position in eBusiness.

Main features

Future prospects

5.4. UBL Title

Universal Business Language (UBL) [24]

Organization/ Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards company (OASIS) Purpose To provide XML document models with which businesses can express their transactions Brief The Universal Business Language [6] is a royalty-free library of standard description electronic XML business documents, designed to provide a universally understood and recognized commercial syntax for legally binding business documents. UBL operates within a standard business framework such as ISO 15000-5 (UN/CEFACT CCTS) in order to provide a complete, standards-based infrastructure that can extend the benefits of existing EDI systems to businesses of all sizes. As the first standard implementation of UN/CEFACT CCTS, the UBL Library is based on a conceptual model of information components known as Business Information Entities. These components are assembled into specific document models such as Order and Invoice, which are then transformed in accordance with UBL Naming and Design Rules into W3C XSD schema syntax. Main features UBL (Version 2.0 — December 2006) provides the following • A library of XML schemas for reusable data components, such as Address, Item and Payment, which are the common data elements of everyday business documents. • A set of XML schemas for common business documents such as Order, Despatch Advice and Invoice that are constructed from the UBL library components and can be used in generic procurement and transportation contexts. • A set of processes and business rules associated with the business documents identified that define a context for their use

Future prospects

UBL starts as generic as possible, with a set of schemas that supply all that is likely to be needed in the 80/20 or core case, which is UBL's primary target. Then it allows both subsetting and extension according to the needs of user communities, industries, nations, etc., according to what is permitted in the derivation mechanism it has chosen. UBL is an emerging standard that has the credentials to dominate the area of Data Modelling in the near future. Towards this direction, UBL has both short-term and long-term strategies for dealing with the need to create variations of basic data structures tuned for different business contexts. The short-term (UBL 1.0) strategy was to provide guidelines for the manual extension of the generic UBL data models. The long-term (post-1.0) strategy is to create a technology for the automatic creation of specific document types based on the particular business context in which they are to be used. UBL intends to build on the ebXML identification of key context drivers (business process, industry, regulatory environment, etc.) in developing this context methodology.

5.5. XBRL Title

eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) [39]

Organization/ XBRL is being developed by an international non-profit consortium of company major companies, organizations and government agencies Purpose To provide a XML-based standard, with which to define and exchange business and financial performance information Brief XBRL (Version 2.1 — December 2003) is a language for the electronic description communication of business and financial data and is an open standard, free of licence fees. It provides guidelines and methodologies in the preparation, analysis and communication of business reporting information. Business reporting includes, but is not limited to, financial statements, financial information, non-financial information and regulatory filings such as annual and quarterly financial statements. The structure of XBRL allows efficient handling of business data by computer software, as it supports all the standard tasks involved in compiling, storing and using business data. Such information can be converted into XBRL by suitable mapping processes or generated in XBRL by software. It can then be searched, selected, exchanged or analysed by computer, or published for ordinary viewing. Main features The XBRL framework splits business reporting information into two components: XBRL instances and taxonomies. XBRL instances contain the facts being reported while the taxonomies define the concepts being communicated by the facts. Taxonomies provide a way to model the semantics of a reporting framework and are extensible. While they can be created by anyone, to date, the largest ones have been created via collaboration amongst accountants seeking to capture generally accepted accounting principles that apply in various jurisdictions. XBRL also enables unique identifying tags to be applied to items of financial data, such as ‘net profit’. However, these are more than simple identifiers, since they provide a range of information about the item, such as whether it is a monetary item, percentage or fraction. XBRL allows labels in any language to be applied to items, as well as accounting references or other subsidiary information. XBRL can show how items are related to one another and can thus represent how they are calculated. It can also identify whether they fall into particular groupings for organizational or presentational purposes. Most importantly, XBRL is easily extensible, so companies and other organizations can adapt it to meet a variety of special requirements. The Dimensions 1.0 Specification is a modular, optional extension to the XBRL 2.1 Specification which allows XBRL taxonomy authors to define and restrict dimensional information for instance authors to use in the segment and scenario elements of the context element of XBRL instance documents. Future XBRL is already being put to practical use in a number of countries and prospects XBRL implementations are growing rapidly around the world.

5.6. xCBL

Title

XML Common Business Library (xCBL) [40]

Organization/ Commerce One company Purpose To provide a collection of XML specifications (both DTD and XML schema) for use in e-business transactions Brief According to the xcbl.org, “The XML Common Business Library (xCBL) is a description set of XML building blocks and a document framework that allows the creation of robust, reusable, XML documents to facilitate global trading”. xCBL 4.0, the latest version, provides a smooth migration path from EDIbased commerce because of its origins in EDI semantics. It is able to support all essential documents and transactions for global e-commerce including multi-company supply chain automation, direct and indirect procurement, planning, auctions, and invoicing and payment in an international multicurrency environment, while it represents an initial alignment with the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) initiative, since some of the UBL recommendations have been adopted in the design of xCBL 4.0. Main features xCBL supports the following classified areas • Order Management: includes xCBL documents that are used for general order creation and processing and are exchanged between trading partners for the procurement of goods or services. • Pre-order Management contains the xCBL documents that are used prior to order creation, e.g. documents used for confirmation or validation of price and inventory information. • Financial encompasses the xCBL documents to be used for the processing of payment for invoicing goods or services rendered.

F. Lampathaki et al. / Computer Standards & Interfaces 31 (2009) 1045–1055

Title

XML Common Business Library (xCBL) [40]

Brief description

• Material Management covers the xCBL documents which are used for managing inventory, e.g. documents associated with the forecasting, shipment, or receipt of goods or services. • Message Management stands for generic xCBL document processing, like general acknowledgement, response and error communication. • Application Integration establishes the interface with backend ERP systems. • Catalog is associated with catalogue content creation, processing and inquiries. • Statistics and forecasting serves for providing statistical data and forecasting data for products over a specified time periods.

Future prospects

The latest version of xCBL was introduced in March 2003. Since then, no attempt to update the standard has been observed. Despite the statement in xCBL.org that “as UBL continues to evolve and mature, additional recommendations and standards will be adopted by xCBL”, it seems that xCBL gives way to UBL. UBL does not replace xCBL in the short term; currently UBL does not contain the depth and breadth of components and documents that exist in xCBL. However, as UBL continues to develop xCBL will migrate to this standard and eventually most existing xCBL components and probably many of the xCBL document structures will be completely replaced by their UBL equivalents and mapping of existing xCBL documents to UBL documents will take place. It is remarkable that even Commerce One plans to publish mappings from xCBL to UBL to make it even easier for xCBL implementers to migrate.

6. Multi-facet evaluation taxonomy for XML data standards In order to classify the various standards prevailing in business transactions, a Standard Evaluation Record has been constructed that contains all the Taxonomy-related information of a Standard, that characterize it. There are 12 identified “facets” for a standard, some of which can be further analyzed in sub-facets, taking values from restricted lists of values, as shown in Table 1. The purpose of each facet is to describe specific characteristics of a standard in a methodological and coherent way that will facilitate the organization of the standards into a taxonomy. The objective of this taxonomy is to provide the means — based on its structure — for the systematic analysis of the contained standards in order to deduct conclusions regarding the most appropriate standard according to the weight each business poses to the criteria — facets. To this end each facet that has been identified describes in a straightforward way — through a set of predefined values — certain features of the standard, specifically: • Scope identifies the type of the transactions towards which the standard is oriented, i.e. business-to-business transactions, business-to-government transactions or business-to-banking institutions transactions. • Completeness, a criterion that is not unambiguously defined, but maps to the following views: ○ Expressiveness defined in terms of process and document coverage and supported business types. Since none of the standards described in the state of the art analysis exhaustingly integrates all the business documents that a business may receive or send, the requirement of expressiveness refers to the number of documents provided, but it should be properly weighted taking into account the context (scope) of the transactions covered. ○ Cross-country support: The term business process encapsulates transactions either between businesses or between a business and a governmental body or a banking institution in “cross-country” level apart from transactions at a national level. The XML Schemas for the data exchanged in such transactions need to be parameterized according to the country's profile since even the documents in the same transaction vary between the different countries, industries

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and governmental institutions. For example, an address can have different required fields depending on the context (country-, industry-, governmental-specific) in which it is used. What is desirable from a data modelling language is the ability to identify a set of mandatory fields that will be the common denominator of the constructs of the documents in all countries and constitute the master document. This master document includes also any field appearing even once, in only one country, but it marks it as optional. When a specific country transaction takes place, the business document “views” per country that customize and parameterize the master document according to the specific country needs are created. However, since the hypothetic situation described above is not met in any data modeling standard to date, the evaluation of the facet will be based on the prospective that each standard seems to have. ○ Multilingual aspects: Since the documents may be exchanged in a range of countries, the solution of formulating the tag identifiers (elements) of the Schemas in English and potentially expressing the data transferred within as tag values in the native language of the country they come from or they address to is not satisfactory. The need for developing mechanisms or providing concepts for translation and internationalization has thereby emerged. • Compatibility with other standards. Since there is a variety of XML Data Standards that businesses have adopted, the need for as compatible as possible standards that do not require difficult and expensive mapping mechanisms emerges. To this direction, since the use of reusable building blocks of core data components (following the UN/CEFACT Core Component Technical Specification) ensures a high degree of compatibility to other existing standards which are based on the Core Components approach, the requirement for compatibility with other standards is answered by the compliance with the Core Component Methodology. • Openness that refers to the extent a standard is open or it needs to satisfy a set of legal criteria, defined in the copyright license. A standard is considered: open if it is subject to no IPRs (intellectual property rights); semi-open if the standardization organization or

Table 1 The proposed evaluation taxonomy. Standard Facets

Facet Potential Values

Scope Completeness

B2B, B2G, BNK transactions Number of documents supported Yes/no Yes/no

Compatibility with other standards Openness Customization capabilities

Expressiveness Cross-country support Multilingual aspects Yes/no

Modularity Expandability Composability

Maturity Standard support

Ease of use and of implementation Modelling of messages Integrated management of enterprise and data models Configuration Versioning management Backward compatibility Additional features Support for rules modelling Workflow capabilities incorporated into the documents

Open/semi-open/close High/medium/low Yes/no Yes/no Inception/traction/hypergrowth/maturity/decline Official (de jure)/industry (de facto)/official (de jure) and industry (de facto) High/medium/low None/basic/advanced High/medium/low

Yes/no Yes/no None/basic/advanced Yes/no

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•

•

•

•

•

•

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companies have copyrights to exercise control over the standard, but they as licensors grant perpetual, non-exclusive, royalty-free rights to publish, use and implement the standard without warranty of any kind; close if it requires any kind of payment. Ability to modify the standard, that refers to the following aspects: ○ Modularity that identifies the extent to which the schemas have been composed out of several parts. It is of crucial importance for a standard to provide the potential to extend a specific part of a schema without affecting the rest of the underlying document. ○ Expandability. Assuming that there exists no standard which fulfils all the requirements one might demand, extensibility of a standard is an important aspect. The standards should provide the opportunity to define new business documents, rules or data constructs to cover the requirements each business may have. ○ Composability, being defined as the ability to compose a document from existing components and conversely given a document to recognize the several parts that constitute it. Maturity. An important factor that must be taken into account is the extent to which the standard is complete since standards can be located on different maturity and usage levels (adapted from [22]): ○ Inception: the standard is being developed, thus it is still volatile and fragile, ○ Traction: early adopters and many introductions can be perceived, as the stability increases ○ Hyper-growth: early majority, industry hype and consultancy and publication explosion can be identified, while different interpretations emerge ○ Maturity: the late majority is involved, the usability is proven, the standard has stabile versions and interoperable tool support. ○ Decline: the traditionalists are ready to engage, yet a new standard has been developed to replace it Standard Support: official (de jure) and industry (de facto). A devout hope in the integration of information systems is to be based on established and universally recognised standards which are supported and updated on a regular basis by standardisation organizations and/or companies specialized in the areas of e-Business and e-Government. Ease of use and of implementation, since the know-how of the data modelling standard should be obtained easily by anyone familiar to the field and not burden them during the implementation phase with unnecessary or complicated details. Modelling of messages: data modeling issues regard not only documents but the messages exchanged in the context of a process as well. In detail, message modelling in this paper is defined in terms of: - The structure of the messages and the XML Schema to which they must conform. - The messaging service and the standard protocols used for the message exchange. - The workflow of the messages required in the context of a process, i.e. a message sending an invoice must be followed by a message acknowledging the receipt of the particular invoice. - Encoding the complete set of the possible error messages. Integrated Management of Models. Business processes and business documents are complementary and should be treated with the same level of abstraction. This balance can be described as the yin and yang of e-business and in practical terms it means developing schemas for business documents and schemas for business processes at the same time, with the same care, and to compatible levels of detail. The particular facet requires: - Abstraction levels that generalize data and enterprise models away from a specific implementation. - Communication bridges between Data and Enterprise Models, since the standards used in Data Modelling must provide concepts to model business documents, which are the data related modelling artefacts from the process modelling point of view. - Transformation from UML Data models to XML Schemas or alternatively to RDBMS definitions.

A main objective in data integration therefore is the unique semantic representation of the data models on a syntax-independent level that can be transformed in any kind of technical syntax (e.g. XML Schema, UML class diagrams, Programming Language Classes, relational database tables). • Configuration Management for the control of the changes (including the recording thereof) that are made to the XML metadata/Schemas throughout the standard's lifecycle. It is viewed under the dimensions of: - Versioning, that tracks and provides control over changes in documents and processes. - Backward compatibility that ensures that only in few cases data is lost going from older to newer versions. To this direction, new versions shall be derived from older versions of the standard and retain the semantics of the older releases to the extent it is possible. • Additional features demanded by the XML Schemas: - Support for rules modelling. Upon creation, e-Business systems must guarantee considerable conformance to the country-specific legal and statutory framework, in order to ensure the validity of the conducted transactions. A part of the local fiscal and accounting directives refers exclusively to the process, but there remains another part that requires modelling of rules bound with legal, security and business issues and incorporating them into the documents. For example, a business rule that can be modelled is the obligation of invoices issued in Greece to indicate the responsible tax authority. The data modelling standards will be judged on their capability of incorporating business rules into the schemas for the coverage of legal issues or for incorporating security and authentication provision to the schemas. - Workflow capabilities of the document: The state of the document transferred during a transaction needs to be indicated within the document. Modelling the set of the possible document states is related to the process workflow and can be achieved by including extra fields into the documents indicating their state at the moment. 7. Populating the multi-facet evaluation taxonomy for XML data standards The XML Data Standards providing generic (not industry-specific) B2B, Schemas recognised and analysed in previous sections have been inserted in the above classification scheme, with the results presented in the following “XML Data Integration Standards Evaluation Matrix” (Table 2). 8. Conclusions Traditionally, data has been designed for specific applications and databases without regard to integration. Achieving B2B integration does not simply mean achieving a technical realization of connectivity between systems — that is readily addressed through the use of existing technical standards and support middleware such as Web services. The biggest remaining challenge for achieving B2B data interoperability is the lack of common understanding at the collaborative business process and data level which is caused by the use of different representations, different purposes, different contexts, and different syntax-dependent approaches. This lack of a common approach has automatically led to significant data interoperability issues when attempting to use the resultant solutions outside of the very narrow scope for which they were developed since data may have the same semantic meaning but be expressed by synonyms (e.g. Surname, Last Name, and Family Name) and/or different meaning of terms (e.g. state as the current status of an object and state as the government of a country). In this paper, a state of the art in XML Data Modelling has been presented revealing the existence of different standards and technologies for data modelling (cXML, eBIS-XML, OAGIS, UBL, XBRL, xCBL) and of methodologies (UN/CEFACT CCTS) that try to look for consensus on the semantic aspect. The main emerging conclusion is that a widely

F. Lampathaki et al. / Computer Standards & Interfaces 31 (2009) 1045–1055

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Table 2 The XML data integration standards evaluation matrix.

Cross-country support

Multilingual aspects

Compatibility with other standards

Openness

Expressiveness B2B

34

No

No

No

14

No

No

434

No

29 N.A.

xCBL v. 4.0

B2B, B2G B2B, BNK B2B B2B, BNK B2B

44

Standard

Maturity Standard support

Standard

cXML v. 1.2.017 eBIS-XML v. 3.09 OAGIS v. 9.1 UBL v. 2.0 XBRL v. 2.1

Scope

Completeness

cXML v. Decline industry (de facto) 1.2.017 eBIS-XML v. Decline official (de jure) 3.09 OAGIS v. Maturity official (de jure) 9.1 UBL v. Maturity official (de jure) and 2.0 industry (de facto) XBRL v. Maturity official (de jure) and 2.1 industry (de facto) xCBL v. Decline industry (de facto) 4.0

Customization capabilities Modularity

Expandability

Composability

Semi-open

Low

Yes

Yes

No

Semi-open

Medium

No

Yes

Yes

No

Semi-open

Medium

Yes

Yes

No Yes

Yes Yes

Yes No

Semi-open Semi-open

High Low

Yes Yes

Yes Yes

No

Yes

No

Semi-open

Medium

Yes

Yes

Ease of use and of Modelling of implementation messages

Configuration Management Integrated management Versioning Backward of enterprise and compatibility data models

Support for Workflow capabilities rules modelling incorporated into the documents

Low

Yes

No

Yes

Yes

None

No

High

Yes

No

Yes

Yes

None

No

High

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Basic

Yes

High

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

Basic

No

High

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

None

No

High

Yes

No

Yes

Yes

Basic

No

recognized algebra for XML data in eBusiness has not emerged yet and there is no single standard that addresses all elements of the interactions among business partners in a B2B, B2G and BNK environment. It is important for businesses to understand the underlying differences as they evaluate the different standards to create e-services. The issue is not which is the best standard; it is not always the best standard that wins out but the standard that fits best the circumstances. To this direction, an evaluation framework that takes the form of a multi-faceted taxonomy has been proposed and can facilitate the design, development, deployment, impact assessment and redesign of e-Business systems as far as their data and semantics aspects are concerned. Using the classification of data integration standards, a spherical view of their features can be obtained, including the level of compatibility with other standards that can be achieved, the maturity level, the requirements for customization, modeling of messages and the means of configuration support. The proposed multi-faceted taxonomy claims novelty on incorporating for the first time aspects, such as integrated management of enterprise and data models, crosscountry support, support for rules modelling, workflow capabilities incorporated into the documents and compatibility with other standards, in the evaluation phase. By populating and using the taxonomy, comprehensive answers can be provided to questions such as: • Which standard fits better the business' requirements? • What risk is taken by adopting each standard? • Which are the documents that can be easily re-used and what are the customization capabilities and constraints that accompany them? For example, when facets such as cross-country support, compatibility with other standards, customization capabilities, standard support and integrated management of enterprise and data models, weight more, UBL Schemas can be exploited, while in case a business is particularly interested in the expressiveness OAGIS can be used. In case, a business is interested in extending the schemas for B2G and BNK transactions, it should examine adoption of UBL.

Additional features

A set of guidelines towards businesses has also emerged during the state of the art analysis phase and can be summarized with the following statements: 1. Analyze your data requirements: the processes you want to automate, the documents you want to exchange in their context and your business partners' profile and infrastructure. 2. Consider vertical, industry-specific XML Data Standards and check whether they are adopted by the businesses you want to transact with and if they cover your requirements. 3. Consider general, industry-independent XML Data Standards and populate the proposed taxonomy of this paper according to your needs and requirements. 4. Decide which standard to adopt. If you decide not to align with any XML Data Standard, at least try to build XML Schemas that comply with the CCTS specification and are semantically-enriched with the context of your business. Future steps along this work include experience case studies from businesses regarding the proposed evaluation framework and further research on Data Modelling Standards at conceptual level and on the mechanisms required for the transition from conceptual to logical and from logical to physical data models. Acknowledgments This paper has been created closely to research activities during the EU-funded project GENESIS (Contract Number FP6-027867). References [1] ANSI Accredited Standards Committee (ASC) X12, 2007, http://www.x12.org/ [2] Asuman Dogac, Ibrahim Cingil, A survey and comparison of business-to-business e-commerce frameworks, ACM SIGecom Exchanges Archive, vol. 2, Issue 2, Spring, 2001, pp. 16–27 [3] Brahim Medjahed, Boualem Benatallah, Athman Bouguettaya, Anne H.H. Ngu, Ahmed K. Elmagarmid, Business-to-business interactions: issues and enabling technologies, VLDB Journal 12 (2003) 59–85.

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Fenareti Lampathaki has graduated with a M.Sc. Degree from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the field of Semantic Interoperability at the same university. Her research interests lie on e-Government and e-Business Interoperability, XML Data Management and Integration, Semantic Web Services, Service-oriented Architectures and Government Transformation. During the last years, she has been involved on several EU-funded and national research projects with interoperability aspects, including the FP6 GENESIS, the FP7 Greek Interoperability Centre and the Greek e-Government Interoperability Framework. Spiros Mouzakitis is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens. He has nine years of industry experience in conception, analysis and implementation of information technology systems. His current research is focused on decision analysis in the field of eBusiness, enterprise interoperability and eGovernment.

George Gionis holds a M.Sc. Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineer at National Technical University of Athens and is currently finalizing his Ph.D. in the field of Interoperability Middleware Architectures and in particular in the field of Rule-Driven Enterprise Service Bus. His research interests comprise modeling and execution of business and legal rules, definition and execution of webservice orchestrations, semantic web services as well as mashup architectures and application and social web practices and tools.

Yannis Charalabidis is a Computer Engineer (BSc, MSc) and holds a PhD in Complex Information Systems Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), where he is currently heading eBusiness and eGovernment Research. He has been employed for 10 years in the European IT Sector, as a manager in Singular IT Group in Greece, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania and the Netherlands. During the last 20 years, he has been involved as a project manager or key executive in more than 50 projects under the ESPRIT, BriteEUram, FP6-FP7 programmes and National Initiatives in European Union, Asia and the US. He is a contributing member in several eGovernment and eBusiness standardization committees and initiatives, including CEN/ISSS eGov, ETSI/B2B Interoperability Standardisation, INTEROP-VLAB, NESSI iGOV Working Group, DEMONET Network, European Commission Interoperability Cluster (as an editor of the Enterprise Interoperability Research Roadmap), IDABC/EIF, SEMIC.EU and IFIP WG 8.5. He has published more than 100 papers in scientific books, journals and conferences, and he lectures on eGovernment, eBusiness and Interoperability in the National Technical University of Athens and the University of the Aegean.

F. Lampathaki et al. / Computer Standards & Interfaces 31 (2009) 1045–1055 Dimitris Askounis is an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). He has been involved in numerous EU funded IT research projects since 1988 (ESPRIT, BRITE-EURAM, FP5, FP6) in the areas of computer integrated manufacturing, enterprise resource planning, decision support, project management, knowledge management, quality management, business and data modelling, interoperability and e-business (PRAXIS, GENESIS), etc. He has also participated in several other EU-funded projects within the EUROPAID framework in CEEC, NIS and MEDA countries concerning management training, monitoring and evaluation of large projects, energy policy and planning.

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