An evaluation and selection framework for interoperability standards

There is a wide range of standards available for the integration and interoperability of applications and information systems, both on domain-specific and domain-neutral levels. The evaluation and selection of interoperability standards are necessary in the application development and integration projects, when there is a need to assess the usefulness of existing models or to find open solutions. In addition, standards have to be evaluated when recommendations are made for a given domain or when their quality is examined. The evaluation of the scope and other aspects of interoperability standards is usually performed against project-specific requirements, but generic frameworks can be used for supporting the evaluation. In this article, we present a conceptual framework which has been developed for the systematic evaluation of interoperability standards. We also present an overview of a process for the evaluation of interoperability standards. We illustrate the use of these models with practical experience and examples.     

Achieving a sustainable interoperability of standards

Agile enterprises and networks are required to continuously evolve so as to adequately respond to a dynamic, global and very competitive business environment. Unfortunately, this continuous change requirement affects the capacity of the enterprise to effectively interoperate internally and externally. Adding to this problem, the standards typically used as pillars for enterprise and network management and (inter)operation are themselves subject to continuous change and often bring their own interoperability, inconsistency and overlap problems. It is essential that such concerns are identified and addressed in a sustainable manner, i.e. taking into account the life cycles of all entities involved as their interoperability capabilities and requirements change along their lives. This paper focuses on interoperability issues specific to standards and proposes a novel and original way forward based on principles tested in previous case studies combining elements from the Enterprise Interoperability, Architecture and Integration, Collaborative Networks and Artificial Intelligence bodies of knowledge.     

Data standards quality measured for achieving enterprise interoperability: the case of the SETU standard for flexible staffing

Data standards should play an important role in achieving inter-organizational interoperability. Millions are spent on development and adoption of these standards, but does it lead to interoperability? This important question is often not addressed. In this study data interoperability in the Dutch temporary staffing industry is studied by focusing on the quality of the SETU standard and its implementations in practice. The Stichting Elektronische Transacties Uitzendbranche (foundation for electronic transactions in the staffing industry) or SETU, develops and maintains standards for exchange of electronic data in the staffing industry. Our results show that although the SETU standard is equipped for achieving interoperability, this in practice has not been achieved due to low quality implementations. We raise the question why these studies are not being performed on every standard. Another result is that localizations (profiles) may be needed for high quality standards; without localizations interoperability is limited in the SETU case.     

XML interoperability standards for seamless communication: An analysis of industry-neutral and domain-specific initiatives

Attaining seamless interoperability among heterogeneous communication systems and technologies remains a great challenge in todays’ networked world. Real time information exchange among heterogeneous and geographically distributed systems is required to support the execution of complex e-business scenarios supported by cross-organizational business processes. XML emerged as a foundation for performing e-business, receiving an increasing adoption in the new market economies. Several interoperability standards emerged, which provide specifications on performing business-to-business e-business, what information to share, when and how. The aim of this article is to present an up-to-date review of current XML-based industry-neutral and domain-specific standardization initiatives towards seamless communication, discussing their commonalities and differences, and highlighting directions for further research and development work. An overview of the main standards’ elements is also made, analyzing how different initiatives address them.As numerous standardization initiatives are quickly emerging and changing, it is not easy to understand them. By analyzing the most commonly referred XML-based standards for interoperability, this article has two main contributions. First, it provides an up-to-date review of the most relevant industry-neutral and domain-specific standardization initiatives aiming at achieving seamless interoperability among communication systems. Second, by comparing these initiatives, a set of recommendations is advanced towards improving further interoperability developments, offering a unique niche for researchers, practitioners and developers to make significant contributions.     

基于Internet工作流的复合Web服务框架

实现灵活方便的企业业务集成一直是信息领域的核心问题，也是B2B电子商务应用的关键．为此将Web服务和传统的工作流技术相结合，设计并实现了支持复合Web服务运行和管理的框架WSFlow．给出了WSFlow的总体结构，描述了其中的关键技术，包括Web服务与工作流活动的动态配置和绑定技术，复合Web服务流程的动态修改以及复合Web服务的运行监控等技术．     

Business to business interoperability: A current review of XML data integration standards

Despite the dawn of the XML era, semantic interoperability issues still remain unsolved. As various initiatives trying to address how the underlying business information should be modelled, named and structured are being realised throughout the world, the importance of moving towards a holistic approach in eBusiness magnifies. In this paper, an attempt to clarify between the standards prevailing in the area is performed and the XML Data Standards providing generic XML Schemas are presented. Based on this “XML Data Standards Map”, a multi-faceted classification mechanism is proposed, leading to an extensible taxonomy of standards. A set of facets is analyzed for each standard, allowing for their classification based on their scope, completeness, compatibility with other standards, openness, ability to modify the schemas and maturity, to name a few. Through populating and querying this multi-faceted classification, a common understanding of Data Integration Standards can be ensured and the choice of a standard according to the requirements of each business can be systematically addressed.     

Semantic Web of Musical Things: Achieving interoperability in the Internet of Musical Things

The Internet of Musical Things (IoMusT) refers to the extension of the Internet of Things paradigm to the musical domain. Interoperability represents a central issue within this domain, where heterogeneous Musical Things serving radically different purposes are envisioned to communicate between each other. Automatic discovery of resources is also a desirable feature in IoMusT ecosystems. However, the existing musical protocols are not adequate to support discoverability and interoperability across the wide heterogeneity of Musical Things, as they are typically not flexible, lack high resolution, are not equipped with inference mechanisms that could exploit on board the information on the whole application environment. Besides, they hardly ever support easy integration with the Web. In addition, IoMusT applications are often characterized by strict requirements in terms of latency of the exchanged messages. Semantic Web of Things technologies have the potential to overcome the limitations of existing musical protocols by enabling discoverability and interoperability across heterogeneous Musical Things. In this paper we propose the Musical Semantic Event Processing Architecture (MUSEPA), a semantically-based architecture designed to meet the IoMusT requirements of low-latency communication, discoverability, interoperability, and automatic inference. The architecture is based on the CoAP protocol, a semantic publish/subscribe broker, and the adoption of shared ontologies for describing Musical Things and their interactions. The code implementing MUSEPA can be accessed at: https://github.com/CIMIL/MUSEPA/.     

矿山物联网标准建设的思考

讨论了矿山物联网标准建设的重要意义,对物联网建设中普遍存在的争议——是标准先行还是应用先行进行了剖析,分析了我国矿山物联网标准建设的现状与发展趋势。对矿山物联网顶层设计中的标准体系规划进行了简要解读,举例分析了哪些是涉及面广的标准,哪些是具体应用的标准。指出矿山物联网标准立项建设时应根据具体情况和标准的内容,灵活掌握标准先行还是应用先行。以网络层时间同步标准为例说明了矿山物联网标准应具有适应性和可扩展性。     

An ontology for videogame interoperability

During the last 20 years, video games have become very popular and widely adopted in our society. However, despite the growth on video game industry, there is a lack of interoperability that allow developers to interchange their information freely and to form stronger partnerships. In this paper we present the Video Game Ontology (VGO), a model for enabling interoperability among video games and enhancing data analysis of gameplay information. We describe the creation process of the ontology, the ontology conceptualization and its evaluation. In addition, we demonstrate the applicability of the Video Game Ontology in action with three example games that take advantage of the created ontology. Also, we demonstrate the use of the VGO in enabling interoperability among the example games.     

Smart urban planning using Big Data analytics to contend with the interoperability in Internet of Things

The recent growth and expansion in the field of Internet of Things (IoT) is providing a great business prospective in the direction of the new era of smart urban. The insight of the smart urban is extensively preferred, as it improves the excellence of life of citizens, connecting several regulations, that is, smart transportation, smart parking, smart environment, smart healthcare, and so forth. Continuous intensification of the multifaceted urban set-up is extensively challenged by real-time processing of data and smart decision capabilities. Consequently, in this paper, we propose a smart city architecture which is based on Big Data analytics. The proposed scheme is comprised of three modules: (1) data acquisition and aggregation module collects varied and diverse data interrelated to city services, (2) data computation and processing module performs normalization, filtration, processing and data analysis, and (3) application and decision module formulates decisions and initiates events. The proposed architecture is a generic solution for the smart urban planning and variety of datasets is analyzed to validate this architecture. In addition, we tested reliable datasets on Hadoop server to verify the threshold limit value (TLV) and the investigation demonstrates that the proposed scheme offer valuable imminent into the community development systems to get better the existing smart urban architecture. Moreover, the efficiency of proposed architecture in terms of throughput is also shown.     

流程业务化定制中的工作流建模方法研究

针对流程业务化定制的需求,提出了一套面向业务人员的、直观易用的工作流建模方法.首先定义了一种基于有向图的工作流模型.在该模型的基础上,通过设置建模规则来规范业务人员的建模行为,使得无需模型验证就能够保证所建过程模型的正确性,从而回避了传统的有向图方法在模型分析方面的缺陷.最后将这套建模方法转化为Petri网的形式来描述,并利用Petri网的分析技术证明了该方法的可靠性.     

Manufacturing interoperability

As manufacturing and commerce become ever more global, companies are dependent increasingly upon the efficient and effective sharing of information with their partners, wherever they may be. Leading manufacturers perform this sharing with computers, which must therefore have the required software to encode and decode the associated electronic transmissions. Because no single company can dictate that all its partners use the same software, standards for how the information is represented become critical for error-free transmission and translation. The terms interoperability and integration are frequently used to refer to this error-free transmission and translation. This paper summarizes two projects underway at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the areas of interoperability testing and integration automation. These projects lay the foundation for at tomorrow’s standards, which we believe will rely heavily upon the use of formal logic representations, commonly called ontologies. Received February 2005: /Accepted: January 2006     

Agile test framework for business-to-business interoperability

Business-to-business (B2B) applications are tested routinely for conformance and interoperability against a set of data exchange standards before deployment. However, the existence of many data exchange standards, planned utilizations, deployment environments, and testing scenarios makes it difficult to develop reusable testing tools. To address this challenge, we propose the Agile Test Framework (ATF), which consists of a test case design and test execution model. Test case is defined at two levels: abstract and executable. The abstract level addresses issues related to human understanding and the executable level addresses issues related to machine processing. The test execution model addresses issues related to both reusability and plug-compatibility. The ATF allows the test engineer to generate test cases for a variety of standards and scenarios. Thus, it increases reusability, extensibility, and efficiency compared to other test frameworks.     

基于Internet的协同产品开发中基于Agent的工作流管理系统框架

基于Internet实现协同产品开发是虚拟制造技术和并行工程思想的融合,而实现它需要一个计算机系统提供有效的管理和支持。文章提出了一个新的框架,在分布式对象技术的基础上,充分发挥工作流技术在任务管理方面的优势和代理技术在知识表达、事务处理、智能性能方面的优势,以代理技术为框架基础,以工作流技术为核心,将这两种技术进行有机结合,使得工作流管理系统能够在Internet的环境下透明地管理协同产品开发中的工作流、资源和数据,从而达到支持协同产品开发的目的。     

PKI互操作性的一种新的信任模型

PKI是解决电子商务和电子政务安全的有效途径。针对不同国家和不同组织采用不同的PKI安全政策和实现引发的互操作性问题,提出了一种新的CA环状信任模型——网关型CA来解决PKI的互操作性。     

Enabling interoperability for LMS educational services

Nowadays, e-learning is undergoing a standardization process. In this paper, an overview of e-learning standardization state of the art is provided and the relationship between Learning Management System (LMS) functionalities and current e-learning standards is presented. Some lacks are found and the importance of defining new standards to cover several LMS aspects is justified. This work describes new e-service specifications for LMS final user application functionalities in order to cover such lacks. In addition, a web-based authoring tool has been implemented according to these new specifications, generating XML files. In this way, interoperability between different new LMS aspects is enabled.     

A generic interoperability testing framework and a systematic development process for automated interoperability testing

Interoperability is a prerequisite to allow users to access systems implemented by different vendors seamlessly. A good baseline to achieve interoperability is the implementation of a common set of standards. However, this is often not sufficient as different implementations of a standard are not necessarily interoperable. Therefore, different implementations of systems need to be assessed for interoperability by applying interoperability testing. In this article, we present a generic framework that enables automated interoperability testing with message checks, which assess the compliance of messages exchanged between systems. The goal of this framework is the provision of a basic functionality of interoperability test entities, the definition of a generic interoperability test environment, and guidelines for the specification of automated interoperability tests. The framework also considers aspects related to interoperability testing including verdicts, automation, and limitations of the system under test. Through the application of the framework, interoperability of systems can be assessed, systems can be validated, and standards can be improved. In addition, we present a systematic development process for automated interoperability tests to formalize the development and specification of an interoperability test system. We also consider aspects and critical issues, which are important for the development of a complete interoperability test system. The framework and the process are language and system technology independent. We present their application in a case study that includes interoperability tests for the Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) using the Testing and Test Control Notation Version 3 (TTCN-3).