Electronic Business Hub Research Project

Project Summary

The objective of this project is to design an Electronic Business Hub (EBH) which provides business partners, government services, and customers with a portal, or an interactive "window," into their collaborative business environment. The hub will be able to integrate front and back office applications, supply chain and e-business capabilities. Users will be able to seamlessly access internal and external applications, hosted services and business content via a single, easy-to-use Web-based environment. Information can be shared in appropriate, effective and efficient ways to enhance business transactions and decision making. The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was designed principally for the exchange of information. In order to provide XML infrastructure for e-commerce, information exchange, effective query of diverse sources and yet more integration of heterogeneous data, we have identified some core issues to address :

Storing and indexing XML data

Scalable mapping schemes which minimizes data fragmentation and storage and gives good query performance is still lacking. Indexing mechanisms and clustering schemes for managing XML data, possibly customized for different databases and applications, are also needed. ·

Generating XML documents from legacy databases

Most business data continue to be stored in relational database systems. Consequently, some mechanism is needed to publish relational data as XML documents. One of the major challenges is to efficiently structure and tag data from one or more tables as a hierarchical XML document.

Mediating/integrating and querying XML data

Techniques to integrate data from multiple XML sources for B2B services must scale up in the number of sources on the Internet. Efficient processing of queries over large numbers of small XML files rather than large XML files is also required.

Building ontologies and DTDs for industry sectors

Defining ontologies for applications allows application developers to reuse data as well as schema information across applications. It also facilitates the integration of multiple databases as well as query processing.

The tools and techniques of the EBH will have direct applications for private and government organizations desiring to propose a serviced electronic marketplace. In particular, EBH will be able to consolidate networks of small and medium enterprises needing to sustain a global competition with the most up-to-date tools for conducting business.

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Project Members

Faculty

Students

Overseas Collaborators

Local Collaborators

Dr Lee Eng Wah, Gintic

Publications

         XOO7

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Related links:

OntoWeb: Ontology-based information exchange for knowledge management and electronic commerce

On-To-Knowledge: Content-driven Knowledge-Management through Evolving Ontologies

Context Interchange Project

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Last update:11/27/2001 04:58 PM