Scope
The capability to efficiently interact, collaborate and exchange
information with business partners and within a company is one of the
most important challenges of each enterprise, especially forced by the
global markets and the resulting competition. Today, many software
systems are completely isolated and not integrated into a homogeneous
structure. This makes it hard to exchange information and to keep
business information in sync. Interoperability can be defined as the
ability of enterprise software and applications to interact. In Europe
between 30-40% of total IT budgets is spent on issues tied to
Interoperability.
This journal aims in exchanging and presenting research activities in
the area of creating interoperability in business information systems.
Ambition of this journal is to get an overview of current research
activities as well as to offer a broad discussion in selected areas of
the interoperability of heterogeneous information systems. It is
proposed to connect research experts from this domain and to exchange
ideas and approaches. It is our goal to connect latest research results
with real-world scenarios in order to increase interoperability in
business information systems.
Mission
The IBIS journal aims at distributing latest research results of the
interoperability domain free of charge. Hence, all accepted issues of
the journal can be downloaded for free at this website. All accepted
articles are peer reviewed by at least three independent members of the
review board. In order to assure an excellent quality, the journal only
accepts highly rated articles. Accepted submissions are published in
the journal and citable. The journal has got an international ISSN
number allowing a unique identification of papers. The International
Journal of Interoperability in Business Information Systems releases 4
issues a year.
Topics
Topics of the journal include, but are not limited to:
* Integration of business information systems
* Enterprise modeling for Interoperability
* Interoperability architectures and frameworks
* Interoperability of business standards
* Intelligent mediators
* Coupling of information systems
* Interoperability of classification systems
* (Semi-)Automatic transformation of standards
* Interoperability of (meta) models
* Semantic integration concepts
* Interoperability between domain specific standards
* Semantic analysis of structured, semi-structured, and
unstructured data
* Interoperability of catalog based information systems
* Cooperation in heterogeneous information systems
* Ontology matching, merging and aligning
* Semantic combination of heterogeneous standards
* Ontology- and model management
* Interoperability of sector specific systems
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Sent: Monday, September 03, 2007 1:48 PM
Subject: IBIS Issue 5 published
Dear colleagues,
we are proud to inform you that the 5th issue of the
International Journal of Interoperability in Business Information
Systems (IBIS) online.
The IBIS-journal is available free of charge at
IBIS aims in exchanging and presenting research activities in
the area of creating interoperability in business information systems.
You may download the full PDF
f> of this issue on our website. All articles are published under the
Digital Peer Publishing Licence. This ensures free distribution and it
also guarantees the authors' rights that no content is modified or
reused without citing the names of authors and holders of rights and
the bibliographical information used.
Summary
IBIS is an academically peer reviewed online journal aiming at
publishing high quality articles. IBIS aims in exchanging and
presenting research activities in the area of creating interoperability
in business information systems. Ambition of this journal is to get an
overview of current research activities as well as to offer a broad
discussion in selected areas of the interoperability of heterogeneous
information systems. It is proposed to connect research experts from
this domain and to exchange ideas and approaches. It is our goal to
connect latest research results with real-world scenarios in order to
increase interoperability in business information systems.
Content of issue 5
We can announce that due to much request and some good input,
we managed to bring up a new journal system which should better meet
your and our needs towards Open Access publishing. Furthermore, we
would like to welcome our new co-editors, Kai Mertins, John Krogstie
and Andreas L.Opdahl.
For this issue, we accepted about 15% of all submissions.The
following titles are included in issue 5:
* PLASMA: A Platform for Schema Matching and Management
Abstract: This paper introduces an XML Schema management platform that
promotes
the use of matching techniques to fulfill the requirements of data
integration and data
exchange. The existing platforms, in the market, deal only with
graphical but not
automatic matching. Several matching algorithms were suggested, by
different
researchers, to automate the correspondences discovery between XML
Schemas. These
algorithms use a wide range of approaches and matching techniques with
systematically many parameters and weights to be adjusted manually. In
our platform
(PLASMA) we suggest a matching algorithm that uses constraints and a
combination of
structural and description matching. In addition to our innovative
matching algorithm,
we adopt an automating tuning for the various structural parameters
used and propose
a Mapping Expression model along with a collection of transformation
operators.
Hence, PLASMA enables a semantic matching process followed by a visual
mapping
process to optimize the translation process between exchanged documents
or
integrated schema.
* Using Ontologies to Model and Understand Product
Development
Abstract: New product development is crucial for almost
any company's future. At the same time,
it is one of the most knowledge-intensive and complex business
processes. Nowadays the high
complexity of most products requires the cooperation of engineers from
various fields such as
mechanical engineering, electronics and software design to achieve
outstanding results. Thus,
project management becomes a most important issue to guide a
development project through
conflicting goals, misunderstandings or scarce resources.
To ease the interoperability between engineering domains, to understand
the different phases of
development projects and translate technical properties into meaningful
key figures for project
assessment, ontologies are a promising technology. The semantic
approach they provide can help to
bridge the inconsistencies between the many domains involved and to
deliver one integrated,
flexible model for engineering projects and processes.
This article shows how partial development information from
domain-specific IT-systems is
converted into an integrated semantic model. Therefore, we discuss
generic development processes
and ontologies representing individual phases and partial models. In
this paper we focus on the task
of data integration when dealing with a set of partial product or
project models: transformations
from source systems into an ontology, mapping of partial models and
coherence of variable models.
The thereby arising integrated model grows with the product and serves
as repository for various
questions concerning the development project such as: Is the project on
time and in budget? Which
requirements are met? Are there conflicts between product elements? To
answer these questions,
metrics and a method for their derivation are introduced and shown in
an example from Software
Development.
The paper closes with the introduction of Permeter, a performance
measurement framework
implementing the described methodology. The framework is under
development at the University of
Oldenburg.
* An Enterprise Application Integration Architecture
Supporting Ontology Based Approach for B2B Collaboration
Abstract: An important task in Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)
is to resolve
syntactic and semantic heterogeneity. Especially difficult the latter
is. Some existing
integration approaches have been criticized for their lack of semantic
richness. They
focus mainly on the technical and syntactical integration. To overcome
these
limitations, this paper introduces novel ontology based architecture to
ensure both
sides of integration: inside Application to Application (A2A) and
outside Business to
Business (B2B), in order to support larger scale of integrations.
Our proposal includes two important parts. First, we suggest an
integration process
basing on mapping approach to bridge applications ontologies. Second,
we introduce an
approach to build business process ontology using web services
composition strategy
and an integration scenario. We also use BPEL4WS language as a
specification language
for expressing business process control flow and constraints.
We hope you will appreciate the journal and the articles we
selected for this issue.
You might also be interested in subscribing to our newsletter
in order to receive an email as soon as a new IBIS issue is published.
Best regards,
your IBIS-Editorial team
(Axel Hahn, Sven Abels, Mathias Uslar,
Kai Mertins, John Krogstie and Andreas L. Opdahl)
__________________________________________
International Journal of
Interoperability in Business
Information Systems (IBIS)
__________________________________________