The ICARIS Project

Intelligent Commercial and Research Information Systems

Activities

• Traditional EDI

  The ICARIS project has studied Traditional EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) extensively. This covers the history of its development, the technical evolution, the "standardisation" processes and the implementation. The objective was to determine why relatively so few organisations in the world have adopted this approach. This study has been successful identifying many reasons for poor adoption. These results have been treated more fully in a paper, "Next Generation EDI" which may be downloaded.

• Workable Interoperation

  Having identified the factors inhibiting the widespread adoption of Traditional EDI. The next step was to devise a method of faciliting the interoperation of business processes which was free of these inhibiting factors and which would be capable of widespread adoption by all sizes of organisation in all intustries, both for internal EAI (Enterprise Application integration) use and external automated B2B (Business-to-Business) Electronic Commerce.

  The result was a new technology that was named BSI (Business System Interoperation). The principles and features of BSI are explained in a notated presentation.

  This presentation may also be downloaded. It is fully scripted in the Notes section, so by printing out the Notes, anybody can make this presentation to an audience.

  Among the many applications for BSI is Data warehousing, business systems Integration projects, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). BSI also overcomes the identified problems inherent in the traditional approach to EDI and permits much greater flexibility and productivity for Web Commerce.

• Uniform Attribute Labels

  One of the requirements for an interoperation technology to be adopted universally is the ability to work in an Open Environment. This means that any organisation who enables its business system for interoperation will be able to initiate interoperations with a similarly enabled business system of any other organisation without requiring either prior discussions with the other organisation to arrange the format and content of attributes and without having to manually customise and implement each trading partner.

  A means of constructing Uniform Semantic Labels has been devised and implemented (the BEACON Project). BEACON is a technology support infrastructure which can be applied to the automating of the design and fabrication of machines, buildings and the manufacture of consumer and commercial products and of Business Information Systems.

• Other Studies

  • The Basic Semantic Repository Project.
  • The Open-edi initiative of ISO and the framework for its standardisation.
  • Synthesising Intelligent Agents to overcome problems of updating and achieving the interoperation of Business Information Systems inhibited by legacy software and data organisation problems.
  • Business Process Automation and the integration of Workflow Management Systems.