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A framework for building Web-based Intelligent Repositories of ICT Solutions for E-business (ARNEIS )

A framework for building Web-based Intelligent Repositories of ICT Solutions for E-business (ARNEIS )

Membri:
Annamaria Goy  
Diego Magro  

Attività

This project has been partially supported by TOCAI.IT FIRB national project (www.dis.uniroma1.it/˜tocai/).

The goal of our work is to exploit advanced web-based technologies, namely Web Services and Semantic Web, in order to support two categories of small-to-medium sized enterprises:
  • ICT companies (i.e., software houses) that offer software solutions for various kinds of business automation, but can be in trouble in getting in contact with their potential customers;
  • small-to-medium sized enterprises that feel the need of improving their technological integration and business automation, but lack the know-how to find the right ICT solution that fits their needs.
ARNEIS architecture
The ARNEIS core (business logic layer) hosts three main components:
  • the UI Manager, that handles the interaction with the user;
  • the Authentication & Knowledge Manager Web Service (WS), that handles the authentication procedures (e.g., user registration and login) and manages the interaction with the Knowledge Base;
  • the Matching Engine, that calculates the matching between the PMI requirements and the software solutions stored in the repository.
The Auth. & Knowledge Manager WS offers a WSDL interface and communicates with the UI Manager (that includes a Web Service client), as well as with external Web Service clients, by means of SOAP messages.

The data layer contains the ARNEIS Knowledge Base, that includes a database (DB) and a set of semantic descriptions (Semantic Descr. KB). The information stored in the DB mainly concerns:
  • The profiles of the companies (software houses and PMI) registerd to the ARNEIS service.
  • The list of areas in which the system based on the ARNEIS framework is "competent", i.e. the areas of business activity that can be supported by software solutions (e.g., Customer Relationship Management, Office Automation, Financial Analysis, and so on). For each area, the DB stores the link to the ontology representing the system semantic competence about that area.
  • The Software Repository, that stores the information about the ICT solutions offered by software houses; for each solution, the DB stores references to: the provider company, the area it belongs to, and the semantic description.
  • The Business Repository, that stores the requirements of the PMI looking for ICT products or services; for each requirement the DB stores references to: the company providing the requirement, the area of interest, and the requirement semantic description.
The Semantic Description KB contains an OWL ontology for each area, as well as an OWL description for each software solution and (optionally) for each PMI requirement.
ARNEIS UI
The ARNEIS core supports two kinds of interaction:
  • human-to-machine (h2m): in this case, the client is a web browser (presentation layer) that supports two web-based User Interfaces (UI):
    • a UI is dedicated to software houses that aim at publishing their software solutions in the ARNEIS repository; this UI enables an employee of the software house to upload the descriptions of the company software products or services;
    • the other UI is designed for PMI that are looking for software solutions supporting their business processes; this UI enables an employee of the company to provide a description of the PMI requirements and needs in order to find products/services that fulfill them.
  • machine-to-machine (m2m): in this case, an External Web Service client, can be integrated within the software system of both PMI or software houses; such a WS client can automatically contact the Auth. & Knowledge Manager WS to upload a new description (or to update or delete an existing one). To this purpose, the Auth. & Knowledge Manager WS offers two WSDL interfaces:
    • an interface for publishing (or updating/deleting) software products/services descriptions,
    • and another one for providing (or updating/deleting) the descriptions of business automation requirements and asking for the most suitable ICT solutions.
In order to test the framework architecture, we built a prototype that exploits a "toy" CRM ontology and a very simple reasoner.

To evaluate the semantic representation and the reasoning mechanisms that can be exploited within our framework, we are developing an ontology representing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) concepts.

This ontology, called O-CREAM (Ontology for Customer RElAtionship Management) is based on DOLCE (Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering), a well-known foundational ontology developed at the Laboratory of Applied Ontology (ISTC-CNR). The DOLCE framework provides O-CREAM with a formal and rich characterization of the basic concepts and relations, making O-CREAM itself a well-founded domain ontology, suitable for supporting interoperability and communications both within a same company and in more open environments.

Besides DOLCE, our approach relies on three other DOLCE-based ontology modules:
  • the Ontology of Descriptions and Situations (DnS), for the representation of roles and for handling reification;
  • the Ontology of Information Objects (OIO), for modeling information objects, which are the basis for the O-CREAM fragment that accounts for the business knowledge1;
  • the Ontology of Plans (OoP), for the notion of plan, used to express the derivation of new business knowledge.

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