Enterprise interoperability has been addressed by research for decades without real success and little impact on SMEs. The market still lacks an affordable, easy to integrate solution: SMEs instead face costly investment, extensive integration effort and significant revision of their working tools and systems.

Commius will build such interoperability tools for SMEs, allowing them to reuse existing and familiar applications for electronic communication. The tools will be downloaded with an SME’s consent using automated self-installation routines. The tools will hook into their email infrastructure.

It will then proceed to establish interoperability agreements with its peers at the levels of system, semantics and process.

System Interoperability

Systems Interoperability will be addressed using email for sending and receiving business documents, thus building interoperability solutions above existing simple ICT. Existing useful properties of email, such as action-oriented and asynchronous communication will be inherited.

Messages and attachments will be analysed and information extracted.

Messages will be modified to include both relevant information and active information elements (links, buttons) linking email message with relevant enterprise resources needed to fulfil interoperability tasks related to the messages.

Interface to legacy systems and existing infrastructures will be designed using an SOA approach and other standard access protocols.

Semantic Interoperability

Semantic Interoperability will assure quick and painless alignment using an extensible core of semantic descriptors which characterize relevant business document types.

Based on text analysis techniques semi-automatic semantic annotation of documents will be performed.

Protocols will be developed to support automatic negotiated semantic alignment.

The core ontology will be (semi-)automatically extended into a particular (business) domain through enrichment with specific concepts and (document) instances.

Process Interoperability

Process Interoperability will address seamless entry into a community of interoperable companies not only at the document but also on the process level. Here, appropriate coordination of activities within and among partners will be supported by the Commius interoperability modules. Reference model templates and patterns of Business Processes will be identified and mapped onto executable protocols. Algorithms to detect Business Processes based on communication and techniques for inter-enterprise process negotiation and process adaptation will be implemented.