Abstract
ABSTRACT The broad adaptation of e-commerce (EC) and information technologies (IT) in business applications has created fierce competition across industries. Many enterprises use a diversity of information systems to support their organizational business processes. This diversity of heterogeneous and incompatible systems often results in the absence of integrated inter-enterprise information architecture. Heterogeneous systems cannot exchange information without considerable manual operations. To operate across organizational boundaries, organizations must fully understand the ways that their business partners do businesses and the documents they used for business transactions. Thus, they can utilize XML as the practical foundation for structuring the information to be interchanged in both process and data levels. Today, there are many de facto XML initiatives for vertical or horizontal B2Bi XML standards, such as OAGIS, ebXML, RosettaNet, and Spec2000. The diversity of XML formats still causes difficulty in facilitating XML-based data exchanges. In order to keep up with the global supply chain integration, companies must have the capabilities to handle multiple XML formats and its versions. This research designs a generic XML hub architecture for B2B data interchange services. The main functions of XML hub prototype include registry, mapping and exchange services. In the XML-Hub, using the Business Process Specification Schema (BPSS) as the kernel of workflow management is developed for real-time process controlling across the inter-enterprises. A prototype is implemented with the real cases in the aerospace supply chain integration and logistic maintenance service. The key contribution of the research is the provision of affordable XML-Hub solution using the most current technologies for communicating different kinds of XML standards in an unified platform including process and data levels. By providing a comprehensive set of XML-Hub functions, it gives enterprises the ability to move towards complete business process integration. Keywords: Business-to-Business Integration (B2Bi), eHub, eXtended Markup Language (XML), XML Schema, XSLT.