Case Study: Interoperability in Business Supply Chain

Abstract

As stated in previous chapters, globalization has become a major trend in today’s business environment and has led to the explosion in the amount of information shared among business partners. As a program/project manager, you need to understand an increasing need of data sharing in heterogeneous business environment that may cause serious interoperability issues during business transaction. In this chapter, you will see how the semantic technology can be exploited to achieve interoperability in globally heterogeneous business supply chains, especially when empowered by the Web service technology. In particular, this chapter presents a semantic gateway demonstrator that shows how semantic technologies, such as, XML, RDF, rule-based RDF transformation, and Web services work together to address the interoperability issues, using a real data exchange example between an engineered container manufacturer and a transportation company. You will also learn about the Web service composition, an enabling technology to construct dynamic and adaptive virtual enterprise by facilitating the RDF document translation in a large scale. In Chap. 7, using the RFID case study, we have already discussed about how those technology integration preparations steps in Chap. 5 and project management tasks in Chap. 6 have been applied. We do not repeat in this chapter and instead, we emphasize the technical aspects to show how a real business problem can be resolved using a technology.