E-business interoperability: Challenges and opportunities

Starting with EDI in the 1970s numerous efforts have been made to facilitate electronic business communications. Early attempts based on proprietary document formats and VAN (Value Added Networks) networks have been superseded by a range of international standards that include ebXML, UBL, BODs, GS1, RosettaNet and numerous other XML-based specifications. While successful in some industry domains, overall e-business standardization suffers from complexity of the specifications, difficult customization and limited extensibility leading to expensive implementation and low adoption rates. A common feature of such e-business standards is their focus on documents as the key artefacts of business communications and reliance on document engineering methods for the design of the standard specifications. In this paper we briefly review the main e-business document standards, and then argue that the document-centric interoperability model underlying most current e-business standards produces inflexible specifications that are difficult to evolve and maintain. As an alternative to the document-centric interoperability model we advocate a service-centric approach based on well-designed domain services.