SZTAKI - Department of Distributed Systems

The basic goal of the ABILITIES (Application Bus for InteroperabiLITy In enlarged Europe SMEs) project is to study, design and develop a federated architecture implemented by a set of intelligent and adaptive UBL active messages (an Application Bus for EAI) and basic interoperability services, which aims at supporting SMEs EAI in e-commerce contexts, specifically in less developed Countries and less RTD intensive industrial sectors.

In particular, ABILITIES will address three research streams:

1. Orientation towards Enlarged Europe SMEs: starting from OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) UBL 1.0 specifications (Universal Business Language), defining a generic XML interchange format for business documents to support a typical order-to-invoice procurement cycle, ABILITIES will make UBL suitable for Enlarged Europe industrial SMEs and will change, extend, and adapt UBL where necessary for this purpose;
2. Federated Architecture and Intelligent Business Documents: provide support for the architecture that ISO 14258 (International Standard prepared by Technical Committee 184) identifies as federated (on-the-fly reconciliation and mapping negotiation, as no reference meta-model can be developed), the most advanced and sophisticated solution from the ICT viewpoint, suitable for the less structured and advanced industrial cases, sectors and domains. Also in the presence of a reference meta-model for order-to-invoice business documents (UBL), ABILITIES will experiment an innovative blended architecture which could join the peculiar advantages of message-based Service Oriented Architectures and Intelligent Multi-Agent Systems, in a context where business documents become intelligent, interactive and multi-media objects;
3. Service Orchestration and Business Process support: Study and provide reconciliation between research and standards in business documents and research and standards in business process management;

In addition, ABILITIES will test and validate such technologies in real-life SMEs-driven business scenarios located in New Member States and implement:

• Collaborative business and co-operative work scenarios for small entrepreneurs (Retail and Tourism) in Lithuania;
• Business process development and interconnection for High-Tech SMEs in Slovakia;
• Mobile and ubiquitous work support in multi-customer distribution Agro-food SMEs networks in Turkey;
• XML-based interactive and adaptive e-business Document exchange (MODA-ML) for the Textile-Clothing SMEs supply chain in Romania;
• Semantic content reconciliation for Tourism SMEs in Hungary;