The doctoral dissertations of the former Helsinki University of Technology (TKK) and Aalto University Schools of Technology (CHEM, ELEC, ENG, SCI) published in electronic format are available in the electronic publications archive of Aalto University - Aaltodoc.
Aalto

E-Business Framework Enabled B2B Integration

Paavo Kotinurmi

Dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Science in Technology to be presented with due permission of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering for public examination and debate in Auditorium T2 at Helsinki University of Technology (Espoo, Finland) on the 29th of October, 2007, at 12 noon.

Overview in PDF format (ISBN 978-951-22-8992-9)   [627 KB]
Dissertation is also available in print (ISBN 978-951-22-8991-2)

Abstract

Standards for B2B integration help to facilitate the interoperability between organisations. These standards, often called e-business frameworks, guide integration by specifying the details for business processes, business documents and secure messaging. Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) is used in modern e-business frameworks instead of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) formats. Having XML as the data format is not enough for integration, but e-business frameworks are needed to guide how XML is used. This work analyses the many partly competing and overlapping e-business frameworks how they differ in support for business processes, documents and secure messaging. In addition, the effect of standardisation organisation to the outcome of the e-business framework is studied.

In this work, one e-business framework, RosettaNet, is used to tackle the challenges of product development (PD) integrations. A proof-of-concept implementation of a RosettaNet integration is provided to support PD and the lessons learned are discussed. The current specifications lack good processes for PD integrations, while they fail in specifying the concepts needed for document management. Furthermore, there are interoperability problems due to a lack of expressivity of the schema languages to encode the business documents, and the current setup of integration takes a very long time.

RosettaNet has a lot of flexibility in the specifications, and thus just supporting the same standard process is not enough for interoperability. With semantic technologies, many shortcomings of the current standards for B2B integration can be solved, as they make it possible to present constraints the current technologies have problems with. This work presents a practical case of B2B integration with semantic technologies and describes the benefits of applying such technologies.

This thesis consists of an overview and of the following 6 publications:

  1. Kotinurmi, P., Borgman, J. and Soininen, T., 2003. Design Document Management in Networked Product Development Using Standard Frameworks. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED 2003), August 19-21, 2003, Stockholm, Sweden, Design Society, 10 pages. © 2003 Design Society. By permission.
  2. Kotinurmi, P., Laesvuori, H., Jokinen, K. and Soininen, T., 2004. Integrating Design Document Management Systems Using the RosettaNet E-Business Framework. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2004), April 14-17, 2004, Porto, Portugal, pp. 502-509. © 2004 Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication (INSTICC). By permission.
  3. Nurmilaakso, J. and Kotinurmi, P., 2004. A Review of XML-Based Supply-Chain Integration. Production Planning & Control, Vol. 15 (6), pp. 608-621.
  4. Nurmilaakso, J., Kotinurmi, P. and Laesvuori, H., 2006. XML-Based E-Business Frameworks and Standardization. Computer Standards & Interfaces, Vol. 28 (5), pp. 585-599.
  5. Kotinurmi, P., Vitvar, T., Haller, A., Richardson, R. and Boran, A., 2006. Semantic Web Services Enabled B2B Integration. Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Data Engineering Issues in E-Commerce and Services (DEECS 2006), June 26, 2006, San Francisco, CA, USA, Springer, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4055, pp. 209-223.
  6. Haller, A., Kotinurmi, P., Vitvar, T. and Oren, E., 2007. Handling Heterogeneity in RosettaNet Messages. Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, March 11-15, 2007, Seoul, Korea, ACM Press, pp. 1368-1374.

Keywords: e-business framework, B2B integration, interoperability, semantic Web Services

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© 2007 Helsinki University of Technology

Last update 2011-05-26