Ontolog invited Speaker Presentation - Professor Dr. Asuman Dogac & Dr. Yalin Yarimagan - Thu 2008.03.06    (17XU)

Conference Call Details:    (17XV)

Attendees    (1A8Z)

Agenda & Proceedings    (1ADI)

Title: Semantic Support for Electronic Business Document Interoperability    (1ADJ)

No document standard is sufficient for all purposes because the requirements significantly differ amongst businesses, industries and geo-political regions. On the other hand, the ultimate aim of business document interoperability is to exchange business data among partners without any prior agreements related to the document syntax and semantics. Therefore, an important characteristic of a document standard is its ability to adapt to different contexts, its extensibility and customization.    (19LY)

UN/CEFACT Core Component Technical Specification (CCTS) is an important landmark in this direction. UN/CEFACT CCTS provides a methodology to identify a set of reusable building blocks, called Core Components to create electronic documents. This concept of defining context-free reusable building blocks, which are available from a single common repository, is an important innovation in business document interoperability.    (19LZ)

CCTS is gaining widespread adoption by both the horizontal and the vertical standard groups. Universal Business Language (UBL) was the first implementation of the CCTS methodology. Some earlier horizontal standards such as Global Standard One (GS1) XML and Open Applications Group Integration Specification (OAGIS), and some vertical industry standards such as CIDX and RosettaNet have also taken up CCTS.    (19M0)

However, a "Core Component Discovery and Reuse" approach to business document interoperability seems to have a problem of scalability and in this talk we address some possible practical semantic approaches to help with this problem. This work is sponsored by the European Commission through the ICT 213031 – iSURF Project.    (19M1)

http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/resource/presentation/AsumanDogac-YalinYarimagan_20080306/AsumanDogac_20080306b.jpg . . . . . . . . http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/resource/presentation/AsumanDogac-YalinYarimagan_20080306/YalinYarimagan_20080306b.jpg    (1ADQ)

          [Professor Dr. Asuman Dogac]         [Dr. Yalin Yarimagan]    (1ADR)

Professor Dr. Asuman Dogac (http://www.srdc.metu.edu.tr/~asuman/) is a full professor of the Department of Computer Engineering at the Middle East Technical University (METU) and the founding director of their Software Research and Development Center (METU-SRDC). Her current research interests include Interoperability, Semantic Web, Internet Computing, eBusiness and eHealth. She is actively working in several European Commission sponsored projects in eHealth and eBusiness. Prof. Dogac received IBM, USA Faculty award in 2004. She is also the recipient of several local awards in Turkey including 2000 Mustafa Parlar Science award.    (1ADT)

Yalin Yarimagan is a PhD from the Department of Computer Engineering at Middle East Technical University (METU). His research interests include semantic web, description logics, eBusiness and distributed systems. Yarimagan has an MS in Computer Engineering from METU.    (1ADU)

Questions, Answers & Discourse:    (1ADZ)

Questions and Discussion captured from the chat session:    (1AYR)

FarrukhNajmi: Is there a difference between "ebXML Core Components" and "UN/CEFACT Core Components"? If so what?

Johann Hoechtl: FarrukhNajmi:I guess slide 12 explained it

FarrukhNajmi: Not really. It just says that CCTS was implemented differently in different orgs

FarrukhNajmi: not whether there is more than 1 CCTS. As I recall there was a messy divorce between 
              UN/CEFACT and OASIS. Messaging RegRep, CPPA came to OASIS. CCTS was contested and 
              not sure what happened after that but OASIS has a CCTS too.

RaviSharma: As a memebr i like to request information on what are the required metadata, taxonomy 
            or hierarchy - classification - required for defining "Context" so documents or 
            set of documents for business processes having matching contexts can be executed? 
            In ebXMl it was BPSS and CPA CPP that defined and matched context?

RaviSharma: Thanks for showing some of this hierarchy in later slides but it is like Excise and Customs 
            code classification, does it imply underlying business processes are being executed such as 
            workflow or round trip messages and documents?

RaviSharma: What happens to relationships when components are merged? does the merged component carry them meaningfully?

Johann Hoechtl: By keeping references to their ancestors?

FarrukhNajmi: Asuman, What are you using for registry and repository component in your project?

Johann Hoechtl: Yim, disregard my initial hands up, mistake

Mustafa Jarrar: As I understood, especially from the examples, you mainly focus on 
                matching/translating/aligning between types of things (i.e. concepts), 
                for example abc:Manufacturing = xyz:Manufacturing, or  
                abc: CatalogueSupplier = xyz: ProviderParty.

                Question1: how about translating between instances (of concepts), for example, how to know that 
                abc:Asuman Dogac is the same thing/individual/person as xyz:Dogac, A., how to deal with such situations.

                Question2: any comment on SPARQL (the RDF Query language), and how it can help to translate between 
                concepts and instances.

                Question3: don't you think that algning instances are harder (mostly the case in practice than) concepts?

                Many thanks for this great talk! --Mustafa Jarrar (University of Cyprus)

Johann Hoechtl: Prof. Dogac, you specifically mentioned inustrial, business  document interchange, I would propose 
                to extend this to also encompass exchange documents in the administrative area 

Johann Hoechtl: Mutual recognition of documents in public adminstation is very important part to leverage 
                cross-country business especially for SMEs

PeterYim: Thank you all for joining us today. See you all next Thursday.  bibi    (1AYS)

... More Questions?    (1AYT)

Audio Recording of this Session    (1AYV)