Business-to-business (B2B) integration is a buzzword which has been used a lot in recent years, with a variety of meanings. Starting with a clear technical definition of this term and its relation to topics like A2A (Application-to-Application), ASP (Application Service Provider), A2A, and B2C (Business-to-Consumer), Christoph Bussler outlines a complete and consistent B2B integration architecture based on a coherent conceptual model. He shows that B2B integration not only requires the exchange of business events between distributed trading partners across networks like the Internet, but also demands back-end application integration within business processes, and thus goes far beyond traditional approaches to enterprise application integration approaches.

His detailed presentation describes how B2B integration standards like RosettaNet or SWIFT, the application integration standard J2EE Connector Architecture and basic standards like XML act together in order to enable business process integration.

The book is the first of its kind that discusses B2B concepts and architectures independent of specific and short-term industrial or academic approaches and thus provides solid and long-lasting knowledge for researchers, students, and professionals interested in the field of B2B integration.

The Semantic Web is a vision - the idea of having data on the Web defined and linked in such a way that it can be used by machines not just for display purposes but for automation, integration and reuse of data across various applications. However, there is a widespread misconception that the Semantic Web is a rehash of existing AI and database work. Kashyap, Bussler, and Moran dispel this notion by presenting the multi-disciplinary technological underpinnings such as machine learning, information retrieval, service-oriented architectures, and grid computing. Thus they combine the informational and computational aspects needed to realize the full potential of the Semantic Web vision.

A decade ago Tim Berners-Lee proposed an extraordinary vision: despite the p- nomenal success of the Web, it would not, and could not, reach its full potential unless it became a place where automated processes could participate as well as people. This meant the publication of documents and data to the web in such a way that they could be interpreted, integrated, aggregated and queried to reveal new connections and answer questions, rather than just browsed and searched. Many scoffed at this idea, interpreting the early emphasis on language design and reas- ing as AI in new clothes. This missed the point. The Grand Challenge of the Semantic Web is one that needs not only the information structure of ontologies, metadata, and data, but also the computational infrastructure of Web Services, P2P and Grid distributed computing and workflows. Consequently, it is a truly who- system and multi-disciplinary effort. This is also an initiative that has to be put into practice. That means a pragmatic approach to standards, tools, mechanisms and methodologies, and real, challenging examples. It would seem self-evident that the Semantic Web should be able to make a major contribution to clinical information discovery. Scientific commu- ties are ideal incubators: knowledge-driven, fragmented, diverse, a range of str- tured and unstructured resources with many disconnected suppliers and consumers of knowledge. Moreover, the clinicians and biosciences have embraced the notions of annotation and classification using ontologies for centuries, and have dema- ing requirements for trust, security, fidelity and expressivity.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the First International Workshop on Business Intelligence for the Real-Time Enterprise, BIRTE 2006, held in Seoul, Korea in September 2006 in conjunction with VLDB 2006, the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases. The papers discuss the five major aspects of business intelligence for the real-time enterprise.

This book contains a collection of selected and revised papers originally presented at the Workshop on Emerging Web Service Technology (WEWST) held in conjunction with the 4th European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS'06) in Zurich, Switzerland, December 2006. It details the latest innovations, developments and results in Web Services research. In addition, the book records the evolution of important ideas emerging in the Web Services field.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Data Engineering Issues in E-Commerce and Services, DEECS 2006 held in San Francisco, California, June 2006.

The book presents 15 revised full papers and 8 revised short papers organized in topical sections on e-commerce services, business processes and services, data and knowledge engineering, business models and analysis, Web services, and e-commerce systems.

This book constitutes the refereed post-proceedings of six international workshops held in conjunction with the Third International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2005, in September 2005. The 41 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected. Among the issues addressed are fundamental process modeling, Web service choreography and orchestration, business process reference models, and business processes and services.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Technologies for E-Services held in September 2005.

The nine revised full papers presented together with one keynote article were carefully reviewed and selected from forty submissions for inclusion in the book. Their common purpose is to identify the technical issues, models and infrastructures that enable enterprises to provide e-services to other businesses and individual customers.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the Second International Workshop on Semantic Web and Databases, SWDB 2004, held in Toronto, Canada in August 2004 as a satellite workshop of VLDB 2004.

The 14 revised full papers presented together with 2 papers by the invited keynote speakers were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from 47 submissions. Among the topics addressed are data semantics, semantic Web services, service-oriented computing, workflow composition, XML semantics, relational tables, ontologies, semantic Web algebra, heterogeneous data sources, context mediation, OWL, ontology engineering, data integration, semantic Web queries, database queries, and peer-to-peer warehouses.

The study reported in this paper is an ongoing effort. We reported a preliminary analysis of the data in the paper. The current experiments varied the subjects to c- duct online group learning activities by the communication media such as email and threaded discussion. Although, we could have easily learned the impact of mobile devices in learning if we divided the subjects to use different hardware such as p- sonal computers, personal digital assistant, or mobile phones, we believe our findings will still be able to provide useful insights on the difficulties that the mobile learners will face in solving problems as a group. Our analysis result will also provide ba- line information on whether the traits of the successful or failed online groups are applicable to the mobile learners. For example, we expect the SMS will be a better medium to overcome the major problem of instant communication or the rapid propagation of the information as the mobile phones have built-in mechanism to remind the users of the incoming new messages and also the mobile phone users are expected to be interrupted for the incoming messages. However, we need further investigation of other problems, which hinder the optimum online group work. For example, 'accuracy of the transferred information' was identified as one of the pr- lems of using emails as the communication medium. Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or SMS are more apt to deliver shorter messages than the typical emails.

The 11th Conference "Artificial Intelligence: Methodology, Systems, Applications - Semantic Web Challenges" (AIMSA 2004) continued successfully pursuing the main aim of the AIMSA series of conferences - to foster the multidisciplinary community of artificial intelligence researchers, embracing both the theoretic underpinnings of the field and the practical issues involved in development, deployment, and maintenance of systems with intelligent behavior. Since the first conference in 1984 AIMSA has provided an ideal forum for international scientific exchange between Central/Eastern Europe and the rest of the world and it is even more important nowadays in the uni- ing Europe. The current AIMSA edition is focused on Semantic Web methods and technologies. The Internet is changing the everyday services landscape, and the way we do things in almost every domain of our life. Web services are rapidly becoming the enabling technology of today's e-business and e-commerce systems, and will soon transform the Web as it is now into a distributed computation and application framework. The emerging Semantic Web paradigm promises to annotate Web artefacts to enable automated reasoning about them. When applied to e-services, the paradigm hopes to provide substantial automation for activities such as discovery, invocation, assembly, and monitoring of e-services. One hundred and seventy-six interesting papers were submitted to the conference.

The 2nd Workshop on Web Services, E-Business, and the Semantic Web (WES) was held during June 16-17, 2003 in conjunction with CAiSE 2003, the 15th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering. The Internet is changing the way businesses operate. Organizations are using the Web to deliver their goods and services, to find trading partners, and to link their existing (maybe legacy) applications to other applications. Web services are rapidly becoming the enabling technology of today's e-business and e-commerce systems, and will soon transform the Web as it is now into a distributed computation and application fra- work. On the other hand, e-business as an emerging concept is also impacting software - plications, the everyday services landscape, and the way we do things in almost each domain of our life. There is already a body of experience accumulated to demonstrate the difference between just having an online presence and using the Web as a stra- gic and functional medium in e-business-to-business interaction (B2B) as well as marketplaces. Finally, the emerging Semantic Web paradigm promises to annotate Web artifacts to enable automated reasoning about them. When applied to e-services, the paradigm hopes to provide substantial automation for activities such as discovery, invocation, assembly, and monitoring of e-services. But much work remains to be done before realizing this vision.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First European Semantic Web Symposium, ESWS 2004, held in Heraklion, Crete, Greece in May 2004.

The 33 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 79 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on ontology engineering, ontology matching and mapping, ontology-based querying, ontology merging and population, infrastructure, semantic web services, service discovery and composition, data from the semantic web, knowledge presentation, applications, content management, and information management and integration.

Business-to-business (B2B) integration is a buzzword which has been used a lot in recent years, with a variety of meanings. Starting with a clear technical definition of this term and its relation to topics like A2A (Application-to-Application), ASP (Application Service Provider), A2A, and B2C (Business-to-Consumer), Christoph Bussler outlines a complete and consistent B2B integration architecture based on a coherent conceptual model. He shows that B2B integration not only requires the exchange of business events between distributed trading partners across networks like the Internet, but also demands back-end application integration within business processes, and thus goes far beyond traditional approaches to enterprise application integration approaches. His detailed presentation describes how B2B integration standards like RosettaNet or SWIFT, the application integration standard J2EE Connector Architecture and basic standards like XML act together in order to enable business process integration. The book is the first of its kind that discusses B2B concepts and architectures independent of specific and short-term industrial or academic approaches and thus provides solid and long-lasting knowledge for researchers, students, and professionals interested in the field of B2B integration.  

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the International Workshop on Web Services, E-Business, and the Semantic Web, WES 2002, held in Toronto, Canada in May 2002 in conjunction with CAiSE 2002. The 18 revised full papers presented together with two keynote papers were carefully selected and improved during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The papers are organized in topical sections on web services, e-business, and e-services and the semantic web.

Christoph Bussler entwickelt Konzepte zur professionellen Organisationsverwaltung und zur ausdrucksstarken Zuordnung von Workflowschritten. Er gibt eine Softwarearchitektur an, die die Schwachen bisheriger Systeme behebt."