Managing complex, open, web-deployable trade objects
Hung Wing · The University of Queensland · 1998
Worldwide co-operation, coupled with increasing competition in every aspect of business, has forced companies to be more flexible and efficient than ever before. Consequently, companies need effective ways of mass-marketing their products and extending their operations to the open global markets, while still trying to minimise operating costs. This must be achieved without reduction in the quality expected in conventional business operations. A demand, then, is created for a just-in-time, on-demand, team-based, networked, geographically dispersed, and automatic approach to business operations, aimed at promoting open trading in the immediate future. The following research provides a generic framework which will support the distribution, sharing and management of structured trade documents. To facilitate the openness and flexibility of trades, an architecture based on the so called Virtual Object Model (VOM), has been introduced. Based on the generic VOM, this architecture provides an integrated environment which supports the different trading services. These services include: 1) the Framework Manager, allowing users to create, view and edit traded documents; 2) the EDI Mapping Facility, allowing inter-organisation trade messages to be understood and effectively used within a heterogeneous trade environment; and 3) the Document-based Workflow Management System (DFMS), allowing trade documents to be systematically routed to the right interchanges at the appropriate times and in the right situations. Provision of the above trading services under one integrated formal framework helps to mask out the complexity associated with the underlying supporting technologies. In addition, using formal methods such as formal concept analysis, speech act, extensible markup language, and Conceptual Graphs, a logic-based formal language, to implement and model the trade objects, allows the complex collaborations and trade states to be enforced, analysed and reasoned about. This thesis describes how we can effectively deploy and support the next generation of electronic commerce applications. I start out by examining what kind of trade contents and collaborations should be captured and subsequently formalised. I then identify and overcome some relevant interoperability problems associated with complex global trading. In particular, I provide useful models and algorithms to remove limitations associated with the conventional Extensible Markup Language (XML), EDI, and Workflow technologies. By doing this, I hope to supply a formal construct which will support Web deployable trading concerned with the specification, distribution, and management of non-record, trade oriented documents representing corporate information.