Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

ERP systems consist of many software components which provide specific functionality. However, these ERP systems are designed as an all-in-one solution, often implementing functionality not needed. The paper presents the reference architecture of a federated ERP system which allows the distri bution of ERP system components on the basis of Web Services and shows how these Web Services can be developed and provided by different software vendors. The architecture draws upon a hierarchical standardization model of data and service types. The model advances the reusability of data types and reduces the necessity of data transformation functions in business process descriptions. Furthermore the concrete architecture of a prototype imple men tation on the bases of open source software components is described.

SEEMP is an European Project that promotes increased partnership between labour market actors and the development of closer relations between private and public employment services, making optimal use of the various actors’ specific characteristics, thus providing job-seekers and employers with better services”. The need for such a flexible collaboration gives rise to the issue of interoperability in both data exchange and share of services. SEEMP proposes a solution that relies on the concepts of services and semantics in order to provide a .

Digital Asset Management is an emerging business for tele- communication companies, especially when applied to the entertainment market. Current implementations try to overcome the integration needs from each actor participating in the business processes by using Enterprise Application Integration. Triple Space is a space-based communication infrastructure which provides semantic mediation between actors involved in a dialogue.

This paper presents a Digital Asset Management use case in which Triple Space will be applied to fulfill the inherent needs of this business domain through the use of this new semantic communication paradigm.

Composing existing web services to obtain new functionalities is important for e-business applications. Deficiencies of aggregated web services can be compensated involving a redundant number of them for critical tasks. Key steps lie in Quality of Service (QoS) evaluation and selection of web services with appropriate quality characteristics in order to avoid frequent and severe faults of a composite web service. This paper, first, surveys the existing approaches for QoS-driven web service selection. Then, it proposes a novel approach for evaluating quality of redundant service compositions through analysis of risk related to the use of external web services. Finally, we describe an improved selection algorithm that takes into account success rate, response time and execution cost of involved web services.

Biometric technology is critical to the rapidly growing suite of civilian applications. In this paper, we offer a broader scope of biometrics by a novel concept, the biometrics grid. The architecture of biometrics grid aims to overcome/resolve three main problems of existing biometric technology using the grid computing: 1) the need for cooperation in different fields, 2) duplicated works and 3) the consideration of application demands in different levels. The proposed architecture of biometrics grid provides a Web portal based virtual environment as well as features like biometric applications meeting QoS goals. Experimental results are given in order to show the feasibility to deploy the idea of grid computing in biometric applications.

Slicing is a method that can extract required segments from data according some special criteria. Program slicing and model slicing are two familiar slicing techniques. By introducing slicing technique into ontology engineering domain, an ontology slicing method is provided in this paper. In the method, an Ontology Dependency Graph (ODG) is derived from OMG’s Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM), and then ontology slices are generated automatically according slicing criteria. This method has many applications in which large scale ontology processing is needed.

Most approaches to B2B interoperability are based on language syntax standardisation, usually by XML Schemas. However, due to XML expressivity limitations, they are difficult to put into practice because language semantics are not available for computerised means. Therefore, there are many attempts to use formal semantics for B2B based on ontologies. However, this is a difficult jump as there is already a huge XML-based B2B framework and ontology-based approaches lack momentum. Our approach to solve this impasse is based on a direct and transparent transfer of existing XML Schemas and XML data to the semantic world. This process is based on a XML Schema to web ontology mapping combined with an XML data to semantic web data one. Once in the semantic space, it is easier to integrate different business standards using ontology alignment tools and to develop business information systems thanks to semantics-aware tools.

We present an approach for efficient semantic-based building-blocks selection in the context of ERPs fast customizing, introducing Enduring Oak, a framework that implements an optimized greedy concept covering algorithm, able to deal with thousands of building block descriptions with reasonable computational times. The proposed approach uses a Description Logics reasoning engine in conjunction with a RDBMS to reduce the computational burden. We motivate the approach, present the framework and algorithms and illustrate experiments confirming the validity of our setting.

It is widely recognized that ontologies can be used to support the semantic integration and interoperability of heterogeneous information systems. Resource Event Agent (REA) is a well-known business ontology that was proposed for ontology-driven enterprise system development. However, the current specification is neither sufficiently explicit nor formal, and thus difficult to operationalize for use in ontology-driven business information systems. In this paper REA is redesigned and formalized following a methodology based on the reengineering extension of the METHONTOLOGY framework for ontology development. The redesign is focused on developing a UML representation of REA that improves upon existing representations and that can easily be transformed into a formal representation. The formal representation of REA is developed in OWL. The paper discusses the choices made in redesigning REA and in transforming REA’s UML representation into a OWL representation.

Web pages representing offerings of products and services are a major source of data for Semantic Web-based e-commerce. This data could be useful for numerous applications, e.g. (1) more precise product search engines and shopping bots, (2) aggregation or enrichment of multi-vendor catalogs using public product descriptions, or (3) the automated discovery of additional alternatives based on the combination of multiple items. While there are already some ontologies for products and services available, they are very large in size (20 – 70,000 classes), and thus not always suitable as ontology imports. In this paper, we take a different approach: We represent the semantics of offerings on the Web using a very lightweight ontology of datatype properties in combi- nation with popular classifications like UNSPSC and eCl@ss. We then demonstrate how this representation can be mapped easily to comprehensive ontologies for products and services like eClassOWL. Our approach provides a straightforward solution for annotating offerings on the Web while avoiding the overhead of importing fully-fledged products and services ontologies in every single annotation. We can show that our proposal has technical advantages and eliminates legal problems when reusing existing standards.