Angela Eck Soong Goh

Issues and Approaches to Dynamic, Service-oriented Multi-enterprise Collaboration

Businesses today form dynamic business alliances to meet short-term business goals. However, in traditional business-to-business integration (B2Bi), the connections are typically long term and static. This paper discusses the potential of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services in overcoming the issues and challenges of dynamic business partnerships. Some outstanding issues and challenges include the formulation of business processes for B2Bi at different levels of granularity and the dynamic composition, matching, selection and invocation of relevant services.

Multi-criteria decision techniques for context-aware B2B collaboration in supply chains

In todays rapidly changing environment, B2B collaboration technologies are crucial to support the growing complexity and diversity of supply chains. This paper proposes a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) technique, Deviation Measure, to support decision making in context-aware B2B collaboration. Empirical investigations to compare this proposed technique against other short-listed MCDM techniques were conducted. The completeness of ranking results, stability and robustness of the ranking sequence when new alternatives are introduced was investigated. The tests also examined the sensitivity of the sequence to changing weights in the criteria used. Results showed that the Deviation Measure technique is the best.

Semantic Similarity between Concepts from Different OWL Ontologies

Ontologies are widely used and play important roles in applications related to knowledge management, knowledge engineering, natural language processing, information retrieval, etc. Computing semantic similarity between concepts from different ontologies is important in ontology operations such as mapping, aligning, and integrating. This paper presents an algorithm to compute the semantic similarity between concepts from different ontologies based on OWL. The concept similarity is the combination of the five components: syntactic, properties, neighborhood, context similarity, and equivalent similarity. It improves previous work by adding the context and equivalent similarity dimension. The experimental results confirm the viability of the algorithm.

A Context Model for B2B Collaborations

Context-awareness (CA) has been applied in different domains, particularly in ubiquitous computing, to provide better value-added services. CA has also been used, albeit sporadically, in business related applications. This paper discusses an on-going research effort in enhancing Business-to-Business (B2B) collaborations through context awareness, specifically to support the formation of short and dynamic connectivity between partners collaborating in a supply chain. Through an understanding of context awareness and how companies evaluate and select prospective suppliers, a B2B Context Model is proposed to discover and match suitable partners. The prospective partners are represented as services in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm.

An Ontology to Support Context-Aware B2B Services

In present day globalised trade, the ability to support collaboration through B2B (Business-to-Business) services is crucial. One of the key challenges is to pervasively connect partners across the entire value chain, with the appropriate service offerings. Thus, it is vital to quickly identify potential partners to form new B2B collaborations or to support formed collaborations with swift decision making abilities. This paper proposes the use of Description Logic (DL) based reasoning to ensure completeness and decidability in reasoning for context-aware B2B services. A B2B Context Model is realised through a DL-based representation language called OWL (Web Ontology Language). The expressivity of OWL was extended through the SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language), to represent business rules identified in the model. The performance scalability of an ontology-based knowledge base using OWL was then investigated. Results showed that such a knowledge base is not scalable.

Multi-criteria, context-enabled B2B partner selection

B2B collaborations today are typically short-term and dynamic, so it is imperative that business processes be quickly and accurately forged. This paper details research that combines both the context-aware (CA) approach and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) technique to select and rank potential partners in context-enabled B2B collaborations. The approach was validated by a case study. A review of context-aware applications and the criteria for the selection of potential partners are also presented.

Context-enabled B2B Collaborations

Traditional ways of collaboration among enterprises are no longer adequate and efficient due to increasingly short cycle times and constantly changing business circumstances. Companies compete as value chains using Business-to-Business (B2B) collaborations based on infocomm technologies, in particular the Internet. Most B2B collaborations are typically long term and static but are pushing towards short term and dynamic connectivity. This paper introduces a context-aware framework to support such short and dynamic B2B collaborations. In this framework, context information in terms of the user (company), temporal and location information is then used to match of suitable services to realize the business processes formed for B2B collaborations. An initial implementation of this approach is presented together with proposed improvements.

Comparing two ontologies

Ontologies play an important role in applications related to knowledge management, natural language processing, information retrieval, etc. As a result, a large number of ontologies have been developed rapidly. Once an ontology is created, it can be used by many different applications. Such applications may use the entire ontology or only a part of it. Furthermore, they may use a part of the ontology and then extend it by adding more knowledge. Since ontologies which are used by different organisations may be related, there is a need to check these relationships. This paper presents an algorithm that compares two ontologies to determine their relationship. A semantic web service discovery application is introduced to highlight the motivation of the algorithm.

An implementation of context-aware partner selection to support supply chain collaborations

Business-to-business (B2B) collaborations are becoming critical to the success and survival of companies. Furthermore, such collaborations are moving from long-term static collaborations to more short-term and flexible collaborations. Such collaborations require connectivity and partnerships to be identified and setup quickly. One such key activity is the identification and selection of partners for collaboration. In this paper, a context-aware approach for partner selection is proposed. This approach uses the context-aware support from a B2B context model and a modified analytic hierarchy process (ABP) method. A prototype implementation of this approach, cognitive advisor, is also discussed. Tests were conducted using the cognitive advisor, with results verifying the viability of this approach.

Context-information support for B2B collaboration

Context information is pervasive and is being tapped by many spheres of human endeavour to enhance decision making. Examples include location-based advertisements and user personalisation. Context-aware computing to facilitate Business-to-Business (B2B) collaboration is largely unexplored. Short-term and dynamic B2B collaboration can benefit from context awareness, as the context of collaboration is often changing and such collaborations must be formed in a short time and with ease (i.e., with as little human intervention as possible). This paper focuses on a specific aspect of such collaborations, namely, partner selection, to support pervasive B2B connectivity in supply chains. It is a key ingredient for dynamic B2B collaboration. Such collaborations are expected to take place on the internet, leveraging prevalent web and context-aware technologies. The aim of this paper is to review existing literature to gather an understanding of context and how the various elements of context are modelled, and investigate how such context models can be adapted to support partner selection in B2B collaboration. The review confirms that context information has indeed not been used in supporting B2B collaboration, though some context aspects from existing context-aware applications can be adapted. As such, a more holistic approach towards the formulation of the B2B Context Model is taken, with a review of supplier selection criteria as an additional foundation for the model.