A novel business context-based approach for improved standards-based systems integration—a feasibility study

Abstract

Systems integration processes need to become more efficient and effective in order to allow enterprises to be nimbler and more responsive in today's dynamic markets. Systems integration typically depends on data exchange standards (DESes) and the associated DES usage specification that provides precise standard implementation requirements. However, there are significant inefficiencies in DES usage specification management today. Therefore, to achieve the objective of more responsive enterprises, DES usage specification management, particularly reuse, needs to advance. The Core Component Technical Specification carries the promise to advance the reuse by introducing the notions of Core Components (CCs), as DES building blocks, and Business Information Entities (BIEs), as DES usage specification. While the CCs idea has been successfully implemented in industry DES, the BIEs idea has been implemented only in a basic form, falling short of enabling the BIE reuse to its full potential. To realize the full potential of the BIE reuse, BIE development in industry standard usage needs to utilize the notion of business context better. In this paper, we reviewed existing business context models including UN/CEFACT Context Model (UCM), Enhanced UCM (E-UCM), and Business Context Ontology (BCOnt) and found that they were promising tools to improve the effectiveness of the BIE development and reuse. In addition to that contribution, this research took a closer look at E-UCM in particular. Two novel assessment criteria called expressiveness and effectiveness were defined. Using an industry use case and the two assessments, we showed short-comings of E-UCM such as semantic ambiguity and business rule disconnection. From there, improvements were outlined for future work to device them into E-UCM to enable a more efficient and effective BIE development and reuse process.