Dear sir,
Following you will find a proposal for a contribution to the Joint Standards Workshop in september. Please let me know if you are unable to read the content of this mail. Looking forward to your reaction,
Wout Hofman
Title: An information architecture of interorganizational workflow
dr.ir. W.J. Hofman,
vice-chairman EBES/T.5 Business and Information Modelling
senior consultant Bakkenist Management Consultants
Outline
Several standardisation bodies are developing their solution to the interoperability between information systems in several organizations. Each of these bodies has its own perspective of the problem, e.g. ISO/TC 184 focusses on industrial automation and integration and ISO/IEC JTC1 SC21 on the communication between information systems in general. There are also relations between standardisation bodies, e.g. ISO/IEC JTC1 SC 14 and UN/ECE WP4 have developed a set of data elements for admistrative data interchange (TDED: Trade Data Element Directory). The ISO is developing a Basic Semantic Repository to store Basic Semantic Units and link them to elements of the TDED. With respect to administrative data interchange, ISO/IEC JTC1 has a special working group on the development of an Open EDI Reference Model, UN/ECE has raised a group investigating Business and Information Modelling for EDI (EBES/T.5), the European Workshop on Open Systems (EWOS) is looking into Electronic Commerce, and UN/ECE is developing a special standard for interactive EDI.
All these bodies investigate the same problem from a different perspective: interoperability between information systems. In the database world, similar achievements and opportunities in database research have been identified by an NSF Workshop on the Future of Database Systems Research. They have amongst others concluded that interoperability of legacy systems is to be provided through the use of so-called mediators. These mediators can perform customized integration and additional filtering or processing. They have identified the question: what tools are necessary to make use of arbitrary information sources in integrated systems as easy as using stand-alone databases.
One of the findings of research we have performed on behalf of the European Commission/DGXIII (1993) with respect to tools for EDI development is: those tools that have not been developed specially for EDI modelling, maintenance, and implementation are not usefull to EDI Standardisation Bodies. Most CASE tools see EDI as a special feature when modelling information systems. Tool developers have made extension to their tools supporting an EDI syntax. Thus, these tools are not able to model mediators and to lnk mediators to legacy systems. Bakkenist Management Consultants has developed an information architecture for management tools and mediators. One of the basic principles of the management tool is to use existing data modelling techniques to develop data models for mediators. The other principle is to use transaction protocols to model communication between legacy systems and procedures for processing transactions by mediators. The process modelling principles are an extension of the transaction processing standards developed by ISO/JTC1 SC21. The procedure concept of Workflow management is refined to be applicable to interorganizational information systems.
Simulation tools are in development to support these process modelling approach. A DOS version of the data modelling software is currently in use by the European automotive industry for development and management of their EDI systems. A first version of the operational software is in use in the transport and telecommunication industry.
We will outline the information architecture and identify issues for future standardisation. These issues are mainly in the application of existing standards to new environments, e.g. transaction processing and procedures applied to interoperability of interorganizational systems. Although we have developed the architecture for EDI applications, we think it can be extended to support other environments like process control systems. In fact, we are integrating the Agriculture Data Interchange Syntax (ADIS) developed by the ISO in our architecture.
Bakkenist Management Consultants B.V.
The main areas of consultancy are strategy, organization and information.