Search

The Universal Business Language (UBL) implements state-of-the-art data modelling concepts following the principles of the ISO 15000-5 (also known as UN/CEFACT Core Component Technical Specification, CCTS). Based on a common library of reusable business data components, UBL defines templates for business documents to support Business-to-Business processes and the related document flow. In the field of e-Government and especially business-to-government (B2G) several heterogeneous document standards exist that do not take into account the benefits of a state-of-the-art data modelling technique. Despite the dawn of the e-Government Interoperability Frameworks' era, governmental data interoperability issues remain unsolved and as long as the semantic discourse of data and standards exists, a holistic approach in e- Government cannot be achieved. To solve current issues regarding the interoperability between enterprises and governments and to foster the conduction of e-Transactions in that area we developed an integrated approach including a comprehensive modelling methodology and environment to extend the scope of UBL towards B2G process and business document support

Today electronic transactions constitute a constantly growing business reality that promises advantages such as reduced transactional cost, seamless information flow, and better communication and collaboration with business partners. However, the creation of a system clearly oriented towards promoting interoperability of existing systems and facilitating electronic transactions between partners of diverse nature, like enterprises and governmental bodies, still faces significant drawbacks such as the high technical complexity of the proposed solutions or the need for intervention of third-party systems in the transactions. Such problems can largely be attributed to the adopted architectures - primarily peer to peer and server based - that impose specific preconditions in the design and implementation of the systems. The present work is an attempt to define and justify a hybrid architecture that shares common elements with peer to peer and server based architectures and relies on emerging technologies and standards in order to achieve application to application interconnection and seamless information flow directly among heterogeneous systems. The approach implies the establishment of a server based environment that will provide all the necessary requirements for enterprise applications to interoperate, execute dynamic workflows and exchange business documents of different formats with applications and systems of other enterprises and governmental bodies.

The design and maintenance of complex engineering systems such as a jet engine generates a significant amount of documentation. Increasingly, aerospace manufacturers are shifting their focus from selling products to providing services. As a result, when designing new products, engineers must increasingly consider the engine's complete life-cycle as part of the design process. To identify possible areas of concern, engineers must obtain knowledge gained from the entire life of similar engines. However, because of the size and distributed nature of the company's operation, engineers often do not have access to front-line maintenance data. In addition, the large number of documents accrued makes it impossible for them to be examined thoroughly. This paper presents a prototype knowledge-based document repository for such an application. It searches and analyzes distributed document resources, and provides engineers with a summary view of the underlying knowledge. The aim is to allow engineers to incorporate maintenance issues into the initial design. Unlike existing document repositories and digital libraries, our approach is knowledge-based, where users browse summary reports instead of following suggested links. To test the validity of our proposed architecture, we have developed and deployed a working prototype.

This paper presents an approach to locating an expert through the use of existing organizational information. This approach was realised through an Expert Finder framework developed by the authors. The framework enables the relationships of heterogeneous information sources to experts to be factored in to the modelling of an individuals’ expertise. The framework also provides an architecture that can be easily adapted to different organizations. The framework has been applied to a real world application and been evaluated using the notions of precision and recall.

The objective of the Semantic Web is to make the Web amenable to computer processing, and hence to improve the value that humans can obtain from it. One of the oft-touted user benefits is improved searching: better-described resources allow search engines to provide better-targeted search results. The aim of this paper is to investigate the way in which Semantic Web technologies can be applied to an office environment as the context in which people work and carry out day-to-day document tasks, focusing on the issues of creating and re-using knowledge-rich documents within that environment. To address these issues, we have analysed and subsequently modelled the knowledge flow in a business writing scenario, and integrated an established commercial off-the-shelf office production environment with knowledge Web services to assist the author in carrying out knowledge writing tasks.

In many large engineering design organizations the information systems have developed over time into a set of heterogeneous resources. This makes it difficult for engineers to follow a trail through the resources. This situation becomes particular difficult when the Engineer is new to a company; unfamiliar with the systems and unaware of the history of the designs. This paper presents a demonstrator system developed with a major aerospace company to aid engineers, through the use of knowledge technologies, to locate the documentation they require. The paper presents the systems and lessons learnt to enable the organisation to move towards a more semantically enriched document repository.

In many organisations people need to locate colleagues with knowledge and information to resolve a problem. Computer based systems that assist users with finding such expertise are increasingly important to organizations and scientific communities. In this paper we discuss the development of an agent based expertise finder (EF) suitable for use within an academic research environment. A key feature of this work is that the EF returns both recommended contacts and supporting documentation. The EF bases its results on information held within the organisation, for example publications, human resource records and not on CVs or user maintained records. The recommendations are presented to the user with due regard to the social context, and are supported by the documents used to make the recommendation. The technology used allows the development of distributed, interchangeable agents that use real time data to find expertise. It is our intention to use this approach within manufacturing and other knowledge intensive organisations.

While knowledge is viewed by many as an asset, it is often difficult to locate particular items within a large electronic corpus. This paper presents an agent based framework for the location of resources to resolve a specific query, and considers the associated design issue. Aspects of the work presented complements current research into both expertise finders and recommender systems. The essential issues for the proposed design are scalability, together with the ability to learn and adapt to changing resources. As knowledge is often implicit within electronic resources, and therefore difficult to locate, we have proposed the use of ontologies, to extract the semantics and infer meaning to obtain the results required. We explore the use of communities of practice, applying ontology-based networks, and e-mail message exchanges to aid the resource discovery process.

This paper addresses the area that is at the intersection of Knowledge Management and Electronic Commerce. This area refers to the exchange and trade of explicit and implicit knowledge at an inter-organisational level. Electronic knowledge marketplaces are currently emerging to address the opportunities and risks found in the purchase and selling of knowledge at the business-to-business (B2B) environment, the need for supporting long-lasting relationships of knowledge exchange and the requirement for facilitating virtual community contexts where knowledge seekers can find suitable knowledge providers and knowledge providers can advertise and sell their available knowledge. The paper describes the business challenges associated with the design of Internet-based knowledge marketplace. INKASS, a European IST project, has stimulated this work and has provided real-life verification on the arguments raised and on the positions adopted herein.