EbXML-Based Electronic Business Interoperability Framework and Test Platform

Abstract

Electronic Business (e-business) system is a typical heterogeneous information system, which is concerned with various data types, communication protocols, business processes, and exchanged business contents between these systems. The interoperability assurance between e-business systems is a key issue for the implementation and application of a seamless e-business environment around the world. The ebXML (e-business XML) initiative is one of the most promising standards in the field of e-business, whose mission is to provide an open, XML-based infrastructure to enable the global use of e-business information in an interoperable, secure, and consistent manner by all trading partners, targeting to the B2B market. The ebXML specification itself can not guarantee the interoperability between various ebXML-based B2B implementations since different organizations may understand and implement ebXML specification in a different way. With more and more e-business systems supporting ebXML, the interoperability assurance among them becomes even challenging. This chapter focuses on how to address the interoperability issues in ebXML-based solutions, and how to achieve the interoperability assurance through testing in a cost-effective way. This chapter proposes a two part solution to address these issues: an interoperability framework for ebXML-based e-business solutions, and a platform for automatic interoperability test. The benefit of this approach is that it provides both a conceptual interoperability framework and interoperability test infrastructure for ebXML-based B2B solutions. This allows industrial organizations to introduce the ebXML-based interoperability framework out of the box, with a readily-used interoperability test infrastructure to be incorporated to their own test tools and environment.