The globalization of everyday business and increasing international trade lead to a growing need to improve national and international business collaborations and transactions. This book shows what ontology management can do for process, information and application integration under dynamic e-business conditions. The authors discuss research results and develop novel methods and frameworks. They then apply them to build business use application components deployed as web services.

Zusammenfassung
E-business integration is a vision we have developed over a long period of time. As we have worked in business practice for many years prior to and in parallel with our academic research, we have always thought of such - tegration not only as an intellectual challenge but also as a real business tool. Consequently, when we started our project on Ontologies-based R- onciliation for Business Integration (ORBI) in 2004, not only pure science but also business objectives were at the center of our research. We were very happy to be able to form a project consortium that consisted not only of renowned researchers but also of experienced business practitioners from a range of companies. Each played a specific role as user, provider or co-developer of the application components that are based on the me- ods we have developed. So may this book find its way not only to the desks of researchers and students, but also into the offices and minds of business practitioners worldwide who are dealing with the challenge of integrating their business processes, applications and information. This book is, in the most general sense, about understanding each other that is, what we do and think. Needless to say, within the project itself, and its environment, we had many opportunities to apply this underlying philosophy. In the end, the results prove it was worth the effort.

Inhalt
Coping with Semantic Variety in E-Business.- Coping with Semantic Variety in E-Business.- E-Business Integration: Processes, Applications, Standards.- Integrating Processes, Applications and Information.- E-Business Standards.- Case Study: Designing ebXML The Work of UN/CEFACT.- Knowledge Management Technologies.- Ontology Engineering.- Advanced Knowledge Creation Techniques.- Semantic Web Programming Frameworks.- E-Business Integration with Semantic Technologies.- A Methodology for Semantic E-Business Integration.- Access Control for E-Business Integration.- Case Study: An Application for Dynamic Semantic E-Business Integration The ORBI Ontology Mediator.- Business Integration Past, Present and Beyond.