Till Janner

Web 2.0 and SOA: Converging Concepts Enabling the Internet of Services

Recently, the relationship between Web 2.0 and service-oriented architectures (SOAs) has received an enormous amount of coverage because of the notion of complexity-hiding and reuse, along with the concept of loosely coupling services. Some argue that Web 2.0 and SOAs have significantly different elements and thus cannot be regarded as parallel philosophies. Others, however, consider the two concepts as complementary and regard Web 2.0 as the global SOA. This paper investigate these two philosophies and their respective applications from both a technological and business perspective

Enterprise Mashups: Design Principles towards the Long Tail of User Needs

A new type of Web-based applications, known as Enterprise Mashups, has been gaining momentum in the last years. Novel design principles are currently about to emerge allowing to cover the long tail of user needs and to provide individual and heterogeneous enterprise applications in a shorter time. In this paper, we introduce the main components of this new paradigm, and discuss the design principles of the architecture (Enterprise Mashup Stack), upcoming intermediaries and mass collaboration, lightweight composition as well as perpetual beta development model.

Patterns for Enterprise Mashups in B2B Collaborations to Foster Lightweight Composition and End User Development

The huge demand for situational and ad-hoc applications desired by the mass of business end users cannot be fully implemented by IT departments. New approaches that allow for End User Development (EUD) are needed to overcome this “long-tail” dilemma. More specifically,most existing approaches insufficiently support EUD for infrequent, situational, and ad-hoc B2B Collaborations.Enterprise Mashup-/ and Lightweight Composition approaches and tools are promising solutions to unleash the huge potential of integrating the mass of users into development. Within the current research project FAST,a Web based Mashup/ Gadget development tool is in development that allows for different options to realizeB2B collaborations via Mashups. In this work, five patterns for the development of Enterprise Mashups are identified, characterized, and evaluated with focus on their adequacy for B2B collaborations.

A core component-based modelling approach for achieving e-business semantics interoperability

The adoption of advanced integration technologies that enable private and public organizations to seamlessly execute their business transactions electronically is still relatively low, especially among governmental bodies and Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Current solutions often lack a common understanding of the underlying business document semantics and most existing approaches are not able to cope with the huge variety of business document formats, stemming from highly diverse requirements of the different stakeholders. Developed and applied in the course of the EU-funded research project GENESIS, this paper presents a comprehensive core component-based business document modelling approach that builds upon existing standards such as the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) and the UN/CEFACT Core Component Technical Specification (CCTS). These standards are extended by introducing the concept of generic business document templates out of which specific documents can be derived according to the actual users needs. Key principle to achieve this flexibility is the integration of business context information that allows for modelling standard-based but at the same time customized business documents. The resulting modelling framework ranges from (tool-supported) graphical data models to the technical representation of the business documents as XML schema documents designed in compliance with the UN/CEFACT XML schema Naming and Design Rules (NDR).

Strategies for Cross-Organizational Service Composition

The automation of cross-organizational business processes bears great potential for companies to extend their market reach, save time, cut costs and respond to customer queries more agilely. However, technological support for the efficient organization of providing and consuming services across corporate boundaries is still not mature enough to allow for a large-scale adoption particularly among small-and medium-sized enterprises. In this article, we propose and evaluate different strategies with regard to architectures supporting the organization of service interconnections: In case of rather standardized and stable business relationships and interactions, a central service orchestration architecture, a hybrid orchestration approach with hub support and finally a fully decentralized peer-to-peer solution without any central control entity are proposed and compared in detail. In cases where business processes are highly complex, variable and dependent on situational factors, we propose a more implicit, declarative service orchestration methodology which builds upon Event-Driven Architectures (EDAs). For the different architectural strategies, we provide real-world exemplary implementations to prove their applicability and to investigate their strengths and weaknesses.

CCTS-based Business Information Modelling for Increasing Cross-Organizational Interoperability

The dissemination of e-Business solutions among small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) is still very low due to various reasons. In the course of the GENESIS project, we aim at designing and deploying a novel e-Business platform that removes entry barriers for these SMEs. We present a living platform that grows over time and provides users with the possibility to seamlessly model and setup business relations with other users and execute these on the basis of a collaboratively designed standard. To achieve interoperability on both a business process and data level, we propose a novel, integrated modeling concept which is partly based on different existing standards such as the ISO 15000-5 CCTS specification (developed by UN/CEFACT). Our approach enables users to intuitively model and setup the unique processes and business documents they are willing to support while adhering to a common repository of data and process components. In this way, we ensurecross-organizational interoperability, facilitate reuse of existing components and leverage the emerging industry standard issued by UN/CEFACT.

The FAST Platform: An Open and Semantically-Enriched Platform for Designing Multi-channel and Enterprise-Class Gadgets

The transfer of the mashup paradigm in corporate environments needs additional capabilities beyond those typically associated with consumer mashups. In this paper, we present the architecture of the FAST platform which allows creating enterprise-class and multi-channel visual building blocks (so called gadgets) in an ad-hoc manner. The design of complex enterprise-class gadgets is supported by an integrated semantic concept which hides the complexity from the actual users. The architectural components of the platform, a technical life cycle model for enterprise mashups, and the FAST gadget ontology are presented. By means of a cross-organizational real-world scenario from the marketing/ promotion event area, we demonstrate the value and potential of the FAST platform.

Web 2.0-Entwicklung — ewige Beta-Version

ZusammenfassungEine neue Generation von internetbasierten Community-Plattformen wie YouTube, Flickr oder del.icio.us hat in den letzten Jahren groβes Interesse in Forschung und Industrie hervorgerufen. Diese Plattformen beziehen den Nutzer als zentralen Teil des Applikationsdesigns explizit mit ein und prägen einen neuen Trend in der Entwicklung von Web-Anwendungen. Zahlreiche Funktionalitäten, die exakt den Bedürfnissen der Nutzer entsprechen, können so bereitgestellt und kontinuierlich weiterentwickelt werden. Dem Paradigma der ewigen Beta-Version entsprechend, stellen Web 2.0-basierte Anwendungen keine statischen Softwareartefakte mehr da. Sie sind vielmehr dezentrale Dienste, die sowohl von Nutzern als auch von Betreibern ständig angepasst werden können. Die fortwährende Anpassung von Web 2.0-Plattformen stellt insbesondere an den Entwicklungsprozess neue Anforderungen. Durch Anwendung von klassischen Methoden der Softwareentwicklung können diese nicht erfüllt werden. Dieser Artikel beschreibt damit verbundene Herausforderungen und mögliche Lösungsansätze und illustriert diese mit zahlreichen Beispielen.

Lightweight composition of ad-hoc enterprise-class applications with context-aware enterprise mashups

The huge demand for ad-hoc and situational enterprise-class applications led to a new kind of Web-based applications, known as enterprise mashups. End users from the business units with no programming skills are empowered to combine and reuse existing company internal and external resources within minutes to new value added applications. In order to handle the growing number of mashable components, we propose a context-aware concept for enterprise mashups that supports users to find relevant components according to their current situation and to compose them automatically. The designed context model which is structured in the three domains agent, computing and environment is implemented in the SAP Research RoofTop Marketplace prototype to demonstrate its applicability and business benefits.

A Holistic Architecture for Collaborative and Highly Automatized e-Business Platforms

In this work, we propose an e-Business architecture that takes into account the specific needs of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and present a model-driven, highly flexible and collaborative approach that fosters cross-organizational interoperability. The specifications defined by the standardization body UN/CEFACT (e.g. UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology. Core component technical specification) and the ebXML standard are central composites of our novel holistic framework that aims at reducing effort required for performing business transactions. The introduction of methods for automatized business process and data negotiation is a further cornerstone of this work.