Semantic Web-based E-business Applications

The paper presents the opportunities given by the Semantic Web technologies for the enterprise integration in the context of development of e-business software applications. Introduction In any enterprise, there are certain “IT-oriented islands” – legacy applications, database management systems (e.g., database relational management systems), client programs, etc. – hard to be incorporated in a consistent semantic-based manner. The integration of enterprise with its suppliers and customers or with entities from different geographical regions is more difficult, because the transferred information (documents, multimedia streams, user’s data, etc.) is very complex. Due of the complexities above mentioned, for a good integration of the business activities, we must find a coherent manner of modeling the main concepts of the eenterprise and the relationships that can be established between the components of the enterprise (Cioca, 2004). The paper will investigate the possibility to use different standardized semantic Web-based languages, such as RDF – Resource Description Framework (Beckett, 2004; Buraga, 2004a), DCMI – Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (Buraga, 2001), and OWL – Web Ontology Language (Buraga, 2004a; Smith et al., 2004), in order to model a complex software system to be deployed within an e-enterprise and to enhance the inter-connectivity between the heterogeneous components of that system. Starting with an UML – Unified Modeling Language (Booch, Rumbaugh & Jacobson, 1999) specification, we can automatically generate XML-based representations of the e-enterprise’s main components (Cioca & Buraga, 2003; Buraga & Cioca, 2004). Levels of enterprise integration In order to integrate various components of an enterprise, we need to address the following levels of integration (see also figure 1): system integration, application integration, business integration, and enterprise integration.