This work presents a platform to aid multi-vendor and multi-industry eBusiness integration for Small to Medium Enterprises (SME) by the creation of specialised Virtual Organisations (VOs). Central to the management and creation of the VOs is the relationship between users and service providers. A framework of VOs and management structures for users and service providers is presented in this thesis within the context of the Business Data Integration Framework for the SME (BDIFS) project. The work has also been applied in the EU Framework 6 project Akogrimo, and is a significant contribution to bDth work and research in the area of VO management and composition.
The motivation for this project is directly related to the need for improvement in current practice within common eBusiness integration solutions that tend to focus on single vendor and industry specific applications. Using emerging distributed computing standards and technology, the VO based solutions presented in this work demonstrate multi-vendor and industry-wide support. The BDIFS application is designed to grow through community involvement as opposed to targeted designs which dominate the evolution of commercial Grids. The BDIFS design has evolved from a Sun JXTA (Juxtapose) design to the main design using WSRF (Web Services Resource Framework) Web Services.
The argument and thought behind the integration platform presented in this work is a result of both academic research into the application of P2P and Web Services in eBusiness solutions, and practical research conducted with SMEs in North Wales. The research in the BDIFS project has illustrated that both current research and solutions provided to aid business-to-business integration by both academia and industry prior to BDIFS are not suitable for many SMEs.
The argument and thought behind the integration platform presented in this work is a result of both academic research into the application of P2P and Web Services in eBusiness solutions, and practical research conducted with SMEs in North Wales. The research in the BDIFS project has illustrated that both current research and solutions provided to aid business-to-business integration by both academia and industry prior to BDIFS are not suitable for many SMEs. In the future there are likely to be other integration problems with other forms of eBusiness integration, for example mobile devices, when included in Service Orientated Architectures (SOA), are likely to pose physical integration problems such as the expression of mobile data which can be done in various vendor specific ways. To address this, the thesis presents a revised BDIFS Web Service architecture applied for use with mobile Web Services, to demonstrate that the BDIFS Web Service architecture can be easily adjusted to handle emerging integration challenges.
In summary, the thesis addresses a key issue in the enablement of complex eBusiness partnerships for SMEs with few technical resources. This is achieved by investigations and use of dynamic VOs, workflow composition and JXTA peer groups. The focus on the dynamic creation of environments to aid eBusiness integration is the key contribution of this work in the field of VOs. Using SMEs as the targeted users, the BDIFS solution demonstrates a viable and highly significant integration framework. The BDIFS framework has the potential to change the way SMEs integrate and it introduces a new approach to application design in this problem area.