Page 181 - E-Bussiness and E-Commerce Management Strategy, Implementation, and Practice

M03_CHAF9601_04_SE_C03.QXD:D01_CHAF7409_04_SE_C01.QXD 16/4/09 11:09 Page 148

148 Part 1 Introduction

One application developed using ebXML is to enable different accounting packages to com-
municate with online order processing systems. This new standard has been recognized by
85% of the accounting industry, the World Wide Web Consortium and the United Nations.
In addition, over 120 national and international accounting software vendors have con-
firmed that they are developing interfaces. Exchequer Software Ltd (www.exchequer.com) is
the first company to embed this new technology in its products, which means it receives
orders via e-mail directly into its own accounting system. This has resulted in a reduction of
30% in processing costs and a sales increase of 40%. The e-business module of the account-
ing software can be used to provide a remotely hosted e-commerce shopping cart system
with regular updates of stock details, pricing matrices, account information and transac-
tional data, such as outstanding orders and invoices.
Governments are also using XML to standardize data transfer between departments.
Examples of the UK government’s draft schema, for example for transfer of patient records,
are at www.govtalk.gov.uk.

Semantic web standards
Semantic web The semantic web is a concept promoted by Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web
Interrelated content Consortium (www.w3.org) to improve upon the capabilities of the current World Wide
including data with
defined meaning, Web. Semantics is the study of the meaning of words and linguistic expressions. For ex-
enabling better exchange ample, the word ‘father’ has the semantic elements male, human and parent and ‘girl’ has the
of information between elements female, human and young. The semantic web is about how to define meaning for
computers and between
people and computers. the content of the web to make it easier to locate relevant information and services rapidly.
As mentioned above, finding information on a particular topic through searching the web is
inexact since there isn’t a standard way of describing the content of web pages. The semantic
web describes the use of meta-data through standards such as the XML, RDF and the
Dublin Core to help users find web resources more readily. Another benefit of the semantic
Agents web is that it will enable data exchange between software agents running on different server
Software programs that or client computers.
can assist humans by
automatically gathering Agents are software programs created to assist humans in performing tasks. In this con-
information from the text they automatically gather information from the Internet or exchange data with other
Internet or exchanging agents based on parameters supplied by the user.
data with other agents
based on parameters The applications of the semantic web are best illustrated through examples. Berners-Lee et
supplied by the user. al. (2001) give the example of a patient seeking medical treatment for a particular condition.
They envisage a patient having a personal software agent (effectively a search engine) which is
used to find the best source of treatment. The patient’s agent will interact with the doctor’s

agent which will describe the symptoms and search pages from different health-care
providers which detail their services. The patient’s agent will then give them the different
treatment options in terms of cost, effectiveness, waiting time and location. Similarly, a per-
sonal agent could be used to find the best flight or a business agent could be used to
participate in a reverse auction.
Although the concept of the semantic web has been established for over 10 years, there
have been relatively few commercial applications, suggesting the difficulty of implementation
together with the lack of demand since the search engines perform well in returning relevant
Wiki
information. The World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3c.org) has compiled some examples
A collaborative interactive
web service which which it updates at www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/UseCases/. The mini case study shows
enables users to modify
content contributed by how the concept of the semantic web had been applied at EDF to help knowledge manage-
others. ment within their intranet.