The NCEB2006 is the 5th International Conference on e-Business, which intends to assess the state of the art in the area of research and development of e-Business and e-Government. It will take place in Bangkong, Thailand at 2.-3. November 2006. Many leading researchers and professionals from all over the world will participate in this conference. By this, the conference is an excellent platform showing the strategic and international aspects and road to success around the remaining open issues of efficient collaboration and interoperability in e-Business. Christoph Schroth, Alexander Schmidt and Till Janner of SAP Research CEC St. Gallen, together with Gunther Stuhec, SAP AG Walldorf, have the excellent opportunity to show the evolutionary path towards the most promising solution in e-Business and e-Government that is developed by UN/CEFACT. An evaluation of the three cornerstones of e-Business standard evolution (EDIFACT, RosettaNet, and UN/CEFACT) points out why all current e-Business standards are not very helpful in overall interoperability, and how it will be solved by the a novel combination of specifications issued by UN/CEFACT. One of the key aspects is the efficient integration and description of business semantic. Because EDIFACT, RosettaNet, and many others only focus on their syntax dependent and static representation of business messages, many different representations of semantically identical information are circulated. Especially this led to massive and inefficient integration and mapping efforts. As a consequence, a flexible and consolidated definition of commonly used business libraries is not possible. UN/CEFACT developed a complete set of methodologies for common modeling of business information and collaborative business processes on business semantic level. These methodologies will be a key part fostering cross-organisational interoperability. Further specifications of the UN/CEFACT standardization stack complete the enviroment for performing real e-Business. The following contribution paper will give more details about the long way to this solution, and more details about it:
SAP has recognized the advantages of some UN/CEFACT standards. Therefore, the new primary and reusable building blocks for business information in SAP NetWeaver™ are based on the so called UN/CEFACT CCTS (Core Component Technical Specifcation) approach that is used to build business information on semantic level. The so-called SAP GDTs (Global Data Types) are provided by the SAP NetWeaver XI™ and can be used equally and without loss of information internally in ABAP or Java applications. You'll find more information about UN/CEFACT CCTS at the following link: UN/CEFACT Core Components Technical Specification (UN/CEFACT CCTS) at SDN
