Talea: An Extensible Framework for E-Business Integration

This paper describes Talea [12], a platform aimed at supporting the development of web-based e-business applications. Talea is a software designed and developed within Diadi 2000 [4], a Piedmont Region project co-founded within the European Structural Funds framework. The main goal of Diadi 2000 is to support the technology transfer to SME (SME) in the Piedmont Region, in order to increase their competitiveness and technological development. We will briefly describe the context in which the Diadi 2000 project has been conceived and carried on, since it is very important to understand the motivations underlying Talea architecture and functionality. Italian SME, especially in the north-west area (Piedmont), are traditionally reluctant to the introduction of technological innovation. Their business strategies are usually based on wellestablished practices, in which face-to-face interaction plays a major role and new technologies, or new business models, are often considered with suspicion and distrust. For example, the majority of SME currently have a web site, but a very small number of these sites are actually integrated with their business activities (transaction management, customer care, marketing, etc.)1. In this perspective, the Enterprise Application Integration process [1], [15] must start from a change in mental attitudes towards innovation and thus the main goal of the Diadi 2000 project is to convince SME that the exploitation of ICT technologies could represent a real added value to their business. In particular, the project, by means of the Talea software platform, aims at introducing Semantic Web technologies, and in particular shared and customizable ontologies, in