Description of eBusiness, eCommerce, and eGovernment
Track
The Internet has
opened a new avenue for interaction between business, government, customers,
and the general public. This is a very active area for standards developers as
well as system implementers. The registries that are the focus of this Open Forum
play important roles in electronic business and some, e.g., XML registries and
UDDI are direct results of efforts in this area. This Track presents and
demonstrates work underway in the standards community as well as in government
and private enterprise organizations.
The emphasis on
electronic business is expanding the concept of electronic commerce beyond the
traditional perceptions of purchasing and paying using standard transaction
sets. Implementation of electronic business expands our thinking and
opportunities to include the relationships among buyers and sellers, their
agents and third parties and takes advantage of the significant process
improvement and reengineering opportunities available through the
implementation of electronic business concepts and technologies.
Interaction can be
among organizations (businesses & government) or between organizations and
consumers. But the Internet also enables a wider spectrum of commercial
activities and information exchanges. It offers firms, individuals and
governments an electronic infrastructure which enables the more efficient
delivery of goods and services and the creation of new markets for goods and
services. A broad spectrum of business, legal, policy and technical issues
affects these uses of the Internet and the next-generation information
infrastructure.
Several standards organizations are working in
this area and special efforts are being made to coordinate the efforts. A
Memorandum of Understanding establishes a coordination mechanism under a unique cooperative
model to produce mutually supportive standards required in business
transactions (data interchange and interoperability), as well as product design
and manufacturing to meet the urgent needs of both industry and end-users. The
founding members of the MoU are the International Electrotechnical Commission
(IEC), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the
International Telecommunication Union (ITU), and the United Nations Economic
Commission for
Federal and state
governments are also working in this area. The track includes government
efforts such as the XML Working Group, which is
chartered under the US Federal CIO Council. The purpose of the XMLWG is to
accelerate, facilitate and catalyze the effective and appropriate
implementation of XML technology in the information systems and planning of the
Federal Government.
This track explores
and demonstrates emerging electronic business standards and technologies, with
special emphasis on the semantic management and the registries that are the
focus of this Open Forum. You will hear about attempts to draw a wide number of
standards development organizations together under a Memorandum of
Understanding. In this and other tracks, you will also see key technologies for
electronic business and business services such as XML registries and UDDI
registries. Work to manage the semantics of electronic business data will also
be described.
In electronic
business, it is one challenge to register and exchange metadata for information
purposes, it is quite another challenge to register and exchange re-useable
data in the form of “business objects”, as part of commitment exchange among
autonomous entities. “Commitment exchange” is the key element in any business
transaction. Business transactions involve Persons as the only type of entity
able to make commitments. The virtual world of the Internet has spawned a
multitude of buzz-words such as electronic commerce, e-business, e-government,
e-logistics, etc. However, irrespective of the information and communications
technologies which may be used, a business transaction still involves two or
more Persons, .i.e. individuals, organizations and public administrations
providing goods and services, buying and selling, etc., ensuring that all the
terms and conditions of a business transaction are (unambiguously) understood
and agreed to by all parties involved.
Electronic
business transactions (whether conducted on a for profit or not for profit
basis) cross many disciplines in industry, politics, strategy, organization,
etc. Because business transactions s transcend any single function or
discipline a common framework was required and developed as an international
standard, i.e. ISO/IEC 14662 “Open-edi Reference Model”. Its key construct is
that a business transaction consists of a “business operational view (BOV” and
a “Functional Services View (FSV)”. A
broad range of standards organizations and industry alliances are using this
Reference Model to and have developed it further to enable enterprises of any size and in any
geographical location to conduct business over the Internet.
The emerging standards
and technologies are intended to provide standard methods to exchange business
messages, conduct trading relationships, communicate data in common terms, and
define and register business processes as scenarios, scenario attributes and
scenario components, i.e. as “objects”. These are known as “business agreement
semantic descriptive techniques” and are focus of the international standard
ISO/IEC 15944. Part 1 deals with Operational Aspects, Part 3 with formal
descriptive techniques and Part 4 with Economic and Accounting Ontology, a.k.a.
business collaboration patterns. The objective of Part 2 is the identification,
registration, referencing and re-useability of common objects in a business
transaction. Re-useability of business scenarios, and scenario components is an
achievable objective because existing (global) business transactions, whether
conducted on a for profit or not for profit basis, already consist of reusable
components unambiguously understood among the participating parties.
This track describes
developments in standards bodies and demonstrates emerging electronic business
technologies.