Future Research Directions

This research only built a simple prototype of the XML and ontology benchmark workload model of heterogeneous information integration. It still needs more effort to expand its capabilities. We expect this work to continue and evolve in the future. Future research directions include:

 Enhancing the ontology query model. The development of an ontological standard presents many opportunities and challenges. New reasoning tasks may arise in the future.

Retrieval (instances of a concept) and realization (most specific class of instance) may not be sufficient. In order to make the ontology query model more comprehensive, further study to keep track of ontology progression is needed.

 Improving the complexity factors of the XML query model. The complexity factors we analyze in the XML query model are still too rough. Each query type can be analyzed more carefully to refine the query model.

 Implementing various data distributions. In this research, only uniform distribution is implemented. It cannot evaluate performance under different distributions.

Implementation of diverse data distributions will become a user requirement.

 Applying the workload model to other applications. Ontology and XML are complementary technologies, and there are other applications that can apply. In this research, we assume the heterogeneous information integration system is used on Intranets, such as enterprise information integration (EII), electronic business (EB), and enterprise application integration (EAI). There are other applications between enterprises that may need to integrate heterogeneous information, such as business-to-business integration (B2Bi), collaborative commerce (C-Commerce), and electronic commerce

(EC). We can modify the workload model of this research to create other benchmarks that are based on XML and ontology with different characteristics.

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赴國外研究心得報告

Internet has changed the way business conducted between companies worldwide. Firms are now used to exchange business information electronically over Internet. Since the mid-1990s, wave after wave of web technology standards emerge to support the electronic business information exchange. Standards like Extensible Markup Language (XML), Internet Electronic Data Exchange (I-EDI), RosettaNet

1

, ebXML

2

, Web Ontology Language (OWL), and Semantic Web (SW) surge and sweep electronic commerce worldwide (W3C 2006) (RosettaNet 2006) (ebXML 2006) (OWL 2004).

These standards impact on contemporary corporations in many aspects. These standards are proposed to provide a uniform way of business information exchange mechanisms.

Semantic not syntactic integration emerges to be the issue that hinders the plan and progress of business-to-business integration electronic commerce (B2Bi EC), which in turn causes time, cost, and reinvention every time there is a change in the public process, there is a change in the standard, and there is a change in the partnership.

The traditional method to tackle the issue can be divided into the programming (ad hoc) approach and the mapping table (syntactic) method. The programming approach solves the problem in a one to one fashion but the result easily becomes the unmanageable

“spaghetti” chaos. The mapping table seems to be an easy and convenientapproach.

However, it only deals with the specific data values not the data definition. An exponentially growing number of trading partners emerge in B2Bi EC. Programming is no longer an effective and flexible way. Mapping table is too primitive and inadequate.

The new complexity of data semantic in the business information exchange makes both approaches even harder to tackle the problem (Stojanovic et al, 2002) (Trastour et al, 2003). We believe that Internet growth makes B2Bi climb to a higher level of exchange, that is, the exchange of business meanings and business constraints. A knowledge-intensive and system-to-system semantic integration model and method is in need.

1

RosettaNet is a consortium of major computer and consumer electronics, electronic components, semiconductor manufacturing, telecommunications and logistics companies working to create and implement industry-wide, electronic commerce and business process standards. RosettaNet is a subsidiary ofGS1 US, formerly the Uniform Code Council, Inc. (UCC).

2

ebXML is a worldwide project initiated and driven by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) and the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT). ebXML is to map out a common framework to enable interoperable electronic commerce and business expressed in XML.

2. RESEARCH ISSUE

Business-to-business integration is to exchange business information between different firms and interoperate the public processes over Internet. The traditional ways of trading include telephone, fax, and email. These approaches introduce faults, redundancies, and wastes. Electronic data interchange is a 1990s and transaction-based approach. However, the change of EDI specification is neither on line or real time. EDI lacks the ability to quickly respond to business changes and suffers from the scalability in the presence of an exponentially growing number of users. Internet EDI is the next stage of B2Bi development. And new B2Bi standards have been proposed based on XML. They indeed provide a more on line and real time method than traditional EDI. However, companies still struggle with the difficulty of heterogeneity and interoperability in the exchange and execution of processes and protocols. In essence, an enhanced approach needs to provide the technology compatibility and the knowledge representation.

Electronic commerce within and across national boundaries is universal. Most firms if not all have problems in one way or another with business process integration and business model interoperability. On both methodological and pragmatic levels, due to increasing diversity in web pages, web services, data sources, and programming languages in all countries, developing an analysis framework of cross national B2Bi resolution is important at international, national, and intra-national levels. This study will develop an analysis framework and a method to explore the way integration and interoperability over schema and semantics can be achieved in B2Bi EC. The dynamics of Internet and intelligence of XML and ontology interplay with inter-organizational context, making it a base for exploring the model and method.

Various approaches have been proposed to study B2Bi issues. However, they lack the process perspective and the semantic representation. Their interoperability is based on adhocracy. Much is needed in the systematic and methodological enhancement. This research intends to tackle the inadequacy of B2Bi standard implementation in forms. An ontology-assisted analysis framework is created to reconcile and represent the conflicts and correspondences in the B2Bi EC issue. Based on the literature, in general, B2Bi framework has three fundamental layers to deal with (Cut et al, 2002) (Falkovych et al, 2003) (Gasevic et al, 2004). They are the communication layer, the content layer, and the process layer. These layers represent the important mechanism and management in B2Bi such as the coupling among partners, the autonomy, and the security. In essence, they mean the specifications of the message formats, the transport protocol, the procedure, and the security mechanism.

3. RESEARCH METHOD

3.1 Analysis-driven Ontology Modeling

The research structure depicted in Figure 1 is the analysis framework we present in the paper to illustrate the model and the method to be developed and deployed in the B2Bi EC standards implementation. The framework is made up of the Unified Modeling Language, the Extensible Markup Language, and the Ontology technologies. Business process interoperability and business data integration are considered the antecedents to B2Bi strategies. More in the framework, a set of analysis procedures are proposed. We analyze the cross national business partners’ data schema and process model. We examine the electronic commerce standard in the aspect of data semantics and process semantics. A set of heuristics and rules will be created to represent the above analyzed processmodelsand dataschemain form ofsyntax and semantics.Thepartners’and the standards’ontologieswillbeseparately developed using therulesand the heuristics.We will merge these ontologies in order to reconcile their conflicts and correspondences. The resulting merged ontologies are tested by the prototype system.

In the end, we hope there is an evolution step to be undertaken to reuse the resulting ontologies. The trading partners can share the domain knowledge in the future standard implementation. The following subsections describe the procedures of the analysis framework and are divided into Step A through Step D. Step A develops the domain ontology of the firm and of the trading partners. Step B creates the domain ontology of the standards. Step C focuses on the ontology knowledge representation for the firm and for the trading partners. Step D creates the ontology knowledge representation of the standards.

[Insert Figure 1 here]

3.2 Step A –Firm PublicProcessOntology,“as-is” A.to analyzethecurrentbusinessprocess,“as-is”

If we want to analyze the current process, in general, we initiate a meeting. The meeting participants include the process owners and the process users. Through interviewing users, we discover detailed information about the current processes. The detail information contains the process goal, the process flow, the process user role, the process input, the process output and others. This information should be minuted. According to the meeting minutes, we draw the UML diagrams. If we understand the current processes more, we can represent the process as in UML without losing its semantics.

A.1 to design the use case diagram

Before we draw a use case diagram, we have to gather data. We analyze the process actors, the process preconditions, and the process flow to fill out an analysis form. Take the purchase order (PO) as an example. There should be two actors in the purchase order process: buyer and seller. Before the buyer orders something, the seller makes a request for a quote document from the seller first. Then, if the buyer accepts the quote, he sends a purchase order to the seller. When the seller receives the purchase order, the seller confirms the order. This scenario is the common and simple one.

A.2 to design the sequence diagram

In a sequence diagram, we try to discover all messages that are exchanged in a business process and in the purchase order. It can be extracted from the use case diagram and the meeting minutes. In the purchase order example, the PO Request is the first message to be sent from the buyer to the seller. When the seller receives the order request, the seller should check the inventory to determine whether the firm can fulfill that purchase order or not. Then the PO Confirmation is the next message to be sent from the seller to the buyer.

A.3 to design the activity diagram

An activity diagram can show the flow from one activity to another activity. It can represent the detailed process flow. We should find the information from discussion at the meetings so as to develop the activity diagram. We need to discover the detailed actions in the flow, the initial state, and the final state. We then continue the PO example and finish the activity diagram. In this example, we have three actions: request a purchase order, check inventory for this order, and confirm this purchase order.

A.4 to design the class diagram

We try to extract a generic class construct from the use case diagram, the sequence diagram, and the activity diagram. Again, we move on with the PO example. First, we work on the use case diagram. We discover four components: the two actors and the two use cases. We take the two major elements in the use case diagram, Actor and Use Case, to form the two classes: Actor and Activity. Next, we extract the class Message from the sequence diagram, because the sequence diagram describes the message flow and the order flow between the objects. Then, we work on the activity diagram which consists of several actions as described above. The class Action can be extracted.

3.3 Step B –Standard PublicProcessOntology,“to-be” B. to develop the EC-standard-compliant business process

We use four UML diagrams to perform the work such as the use case diagram, the sequence diagram, the activity diagram, and the class diagram. They are utilized to model an EC-standard-compliant business process. The mapping methods between the four diagrams are the same as in Step A. The difference between Step A and Step B is the source of analysis. Step A focuses on the firm existing and current public processes. We have to collect and examine them through interviews and observations. We model the standard processes from B2Bi EC standard specifications at Step B. Some B2B standards have the concept of process, but some do not. If they do not, we should discuss this issue with the trading partners in order to develop a new standard process specification based on the B2Bi EC recommendation. Of course, some B2B standards have adopted UML diagrams to present their standard processes in the specification. We can directly use them.

B.1 to design the use case diagram

We develop the use case diagram based on the B2B standard specification. A B2B standard specification often describes the process purpose and the process definition in the statements. We search and extract the basic components for a use case from the

We develop the use case diagram based on the B2B standard specification. A B2B standard specification often describes the process purpose and the process definition in the statements. We search and extract the basic components for a use case from the