Object-oriented XML document meta-model for B2B collaborations

Abstract

This paper suggests an object-oriented eXtensible Markup Language (XML) document meta-model that supports business-to-business (B2B) collaborations. Distributed organizations collaborate with each other by sharing manufacturing information or exchanging trading documents. However, each organization often has different data formats, communication methods and databases. Therefore, to execute collaborative interactions between distributed organizations, it is important to develop an information integration technology between heterogeneous information sources. Automatic interpretation of communicated data and integration of the data with legacy databases within enterprises will be an enabler technology for the effective implementation of B2B collaborations. In this paper, we propose a document data model that efficiently integrates XML documents as a medium to exchange data on the internet among inter-enterprise databases. We expect the model to contribute to the execution of e-Work, which focuses on the efficient integration of distributed applications.