Nicola Gessa

Supporting eBusiness with a dictionary designed in a vertical standardization perspective

The authors, try to redefine the requirements and the logical architecture for a dictionary that supports a vertical collaboration framework in a standardisation perspective; to this aim the analysis of important vertical and horizontal standardisation initiatives (like EDIFACT and the most recent UBL) as well as the difficulties in setting B2B standards, is a key starting point. The paper aims to put in evidence how the requirements deriving from an industrial sector, characterised by the large presence of SMEs, leaded to an advanced and flexible approach; it maintains relationships with the world of B2B standards but differs from the philosophy that animates B2B frameworks, influenced by the EDIFACT experience. The dictionary and the related tools were experienced in the Moda-ML initiative that contributed to set the CEN/ISSS TexSpin and TexWeave specifications for the textile clothing industry.

Extracting a semantic view from an ebusiness vocabulary

B2B applications needs common formats and standards upon which to implement interoperability tools; in this paper the authors describe an approach to provide a semantic description of a document-based collaborative framework. The starting point is an ISO 11179 compliant vocabulary of business terms and a set of processes and documents, represented using a modular ontology expressed in OWL; the ontology is extracted by a software module in an automatic manner. The authors expect the ontology will support the maintenance of the framework and the data integration toward enterprises. This approach has been applied on a standard dictionary of the textile/clothing sector and represents the basis for the development of an ontology, named ONTO-MODA, within the European research project LEAPFROG IP

Use and Extension of ebXML Business Profiles for Textile/Clothing Firms

Managing business workflow can benefit from the adoption of new solutions proposed by different initiatives of ICT. MODA-ML project defined an interoperability framework, based on ebXML standard, to enhance collaboration and interaction inside the Textile/Clothing supply chain. In this paper we briefly give an overview of the architecture of MODA-ML and we present our approach to generate automatically BPSS documents to provide a common formal description of the business process supported. Because of the requirements of the T/C sector, we have also studied some improvements to obtain more flexibility in defining partner profiles with CPP documents.