ENEA experience in message based interoperability Arianna Brutti, ENEA XLAB arianna.brutti@bologna.enea.it Matteo Busanelli, ENEA XLAB matteo.busanelli@bologna.enea.it 1 agosto 2008
Summary Our Experience and learnt lessons Our approach and tools 1 agosto 2008-2
The experience The activities: 1. Creation, maintenance and fostering of a sectorial standard for sector dominated by SMEs (Moda-ML) 2. Fostering adoption and customisation of UBL for sectorial ebusiness processes 3. Support on UBL for egovernment (pubblic procurement) The domains: Networks of manufacturers Relationships between manufacturers and retail Pubblic administration versus Enterprises Different domains express different requirement Need to reduce the need for Priests of the interoperability religion 1 agosto 2008-3
Case study 1: from Moda-ML to ebiz-tcf Setting up a reference European sectorial architecture for ebusiness on behalf of DG Enterprise & industry Involvement of (European) industry trade associations of Textile-Clothing and, partially, Footwear Top down approach Identified two different areas (and requirements): Networks of manufacturers (upstream), sectorial specification (vertical languages: Moda-ML, Shoenet) Manufacturer to Retail (downstream) adoption of a profile of use of UBL (horizontal language) New type of UBL document proposed to OASIS UBL TC 1 agosto 2008-4
Case study 1/2 Two areas: Networks of manufacturers (small numbers, customised connection, flexibility and completeness, efficacy) Producer to retail relationships (large numbers, standardised connection, normalisation, efficiency) Requirements Guidance (reference scenarios, dictionaries, suggested practices) Access (public specifications, non proprietary tools required) Duration of investments (trustability of the proponents, international level, standardisation) Simplicity (solution manageable by your own consultant/supplier or full outsourcing as a service) and low threshold to begin Controlled impact on existing organisational procedures 1 agosto 2008-5
Case study 1/3 Customisation of UBL (as standard international language) well accepted The choice of UBL (horizontal language) requires strongly the definition of a sectorial USE PROFILE to reduce (semantic) ambiguity of the specifications Documentation must be sector specific for wider adoption Large scale networks require more guidance (few models not ambiguous) Small scale networks require more flexibility (common dictionary and methods, case by case implementative choices) 1 agosto 2008-6
Interoperability as Adoption of common ebusiness organisational scenarios Adoption of common standardised dictionaries Cross-border unambiguity of the information 1 agosto 2008-7
Case study 2: fostering UBL to small SW. H. Promoting adoption of UBL for sectorial supply chains (Tiles, Iron foundries) to improve existing ERP Involvement of local small Software Houses and (lightly) of industry associations Bottom Up approach, small scale Activity: Feasibility studies Requirements Duration of the investment (role of associations, openess to international standards) Coverage of existing processes and taylorability to specific cases Technical and strategic support from public bodies or research Necessity of a critical mass of early adopters Improvement of existing ICT products and opening of new market opportunity 1 agosto 2008-8
Case study 2/2 Request from SW. Houses: not for Best Available Technologies but for Most Diffused/Accepted Technologies Relevance of flexibility and capacity to follow customer requirements Case by case approach with lower cost to setup new collaborative applications 1 agosto 2008-9
Interoperability as Implemementation of status of art specifications Additional functionality of ICT products Openess of the applications towards external worlds Lowering the cost of setting up collaborations 1 agosto 2008-10
Case study 3 Adoption of UBL for public procurement The crucial point is the capability to meet international standards in financial fields (ISO 20020 UNIFI) and other international initiatives (IDABC, CEN/ISSS WS/BII, etc ) and legal issues Top down approach Activity: support to national public committees Strict guidance (few prescriptive models, not ambiguous) Large scale networks Market neutrality Potential space for providers of services Focus on einvoicing 1 agosto 2008-11
Interoperability as: consistency with existing legal normative compliance with international standards from other domains (financing, banking, egovernment) openess to market operators 1 agosto 2008-12
Our approach The starting point is a feasibility study: Analysis: acquisition of organisational and technical scenarios about the sectorial intercompany practices analisys of priorities modellisation of information flows Design: appropriateness of UBL (or other standardised specifications) to support the specific message exchanges; Design of use profiles for the standard specifications as mapping between sectorial scenarios and std scenarios Guidance to implementation and documentation taylored for the early adopters. CRITICAL ASPECTS: time to deliver, misunderstandings on specific data, efficacy of documentation 1 agosto 2008-13
Some problems Difficult acquisition of company internal data models: text files, paper documents, etc Lack of tools for semantic search of existing concepts inside the standardised specifications and for rules to set up mapping between local views and global (standardised) view; Lacking or poor rules about customisation and mapping; No formal (and diffused) language to describe the mapping outcomes (only inside proprietary tools). 1 agosto 2008-14
An example 1/2 Document supplied by a firm: a document with tables describing the content model of a order response document 1 agosto 2008-15
An example 2/2 Our rules of mapping towards UBL specifications Each path of the Path UBL column is preceded by OrderResponse element. Content of document Document function Document number Document date Supplier order number Supplier order date Description Function performed by the present message with regards to the transmission (it can be original, copy, ). An identifier for the Initial Order Response assigned by the Supplier (seller) The date on which the Initial Order Response was issued (YYYYMMDD). The Order identifier assigned by the Supplier (the reference of the Order being responded to). The date on which the Order was issued. cbc:copyindicator cbc:id Path UBL cbc:issuedate cbc:salesorderid cac:orderreference/ cbc:issuedate 1 agosto 2008-16
Tools and Open issues Tools for semi-automatic mapping and support to its documentation; X-LAB developed (Leapfrog IP integrated project) the Ontology Explorer: a web application to explore and browse a generic OWL ontology; tested on UBL 2.0 and OntoModa Ontologies X-Lab developed and maintains a sectorial ONTO-MODA ontology for Textile Clothing industry closely related with CEN/ISSS and Moda-ML specifications X-Lab has setup a tool to automatically generate an UBL 2.0 ontology to semantically describes processes, activities and UBL documents in terms of structural components and their relationships X-Lab is developing a tool to support concept research and mapping of elements between internal company data representation and UBL taylored for sets of coherent documents (order, response, etc). Open issue: a well accepted language to define mappings and related rules. 1 agosto 2008-17