Leveraging Web Services for Implementing Vertical Industry Standards: A Model for Service‐Based Interoperability

Abstract

With deeper levels of external process integration and a growing number of electronic business relationships, enterprises are striving to become more interoperable with their business partners. While two‐way integration linkages have mostly been realized as point‐to‐point connections with a handful of business partners, new integration technologies such as Web services and XML give enterprises the opportunity to pursue more cost‐efficient and scalable ways of external business process integration. This research develops a model for service‐based B2B interoperability that leverages Web service technologies for implementing industry standards. The authors instantiate the conceptual model in a B2B scenario in the automotive industry, where a consortium of automotive manufacturers and suppliers are currently redesigning their interorganizational engineering change management processes. From the evaluation, the authors suggest that the specification of standards related to pragmatics, semantics and syntax has to be complemented by additional design rules which define how industry standards are mapped to a public Web service design. The paper concludes with a revised model for service‐based interoperability and discusses implications for B2B standardization.

Keywords:

• B2B integration
• interoperability
• standard development
• Web services
• service‐oriented architecture (SOA)
• XML document engineering

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research has been conducted in the context of the Competence Center Business Networking 3 (CC BN3) and the EU‐funded research project ATHENA at University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. The authors would like to thank all industry partners for their cooperation.