ABILITIES- Application Bus for InteroperabiLITy In enlarged Europe SMEs

About

The ABILITIES Project was part of the European Commission Sixth Framework Programme belonging to the Information Society Technologies (IST).

The goal of ABILITIES was to study, design and develop solutions for easy interoperability for the order-to-invoice procurement cycle. The focus is on supporting Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), specifically in less developed Countries and less Research and Technological Development (RTD) intensive industrial sectors.

The project was scheduled for 2 years starting from 1st of January 2006 under the coordination of TXT e-Solutions (Italy). All together 12 partners where involved coming from Italy, Turkey, Lithuania, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary and Germany. The project officially ended end of February 2008

European Commission grant IST 027306.

Contact at DBIS

The contact person for the project at DBIS is:

Please do not hesitate to send an email in case you have any question or comment related to the ABILITIES Project.

Resources

Available public deliverables:

You can find resources and programs generated in scope of the ABILITIES project under: http://sourceforge.net/projects/abilities/.

Charter

The basic goal of the present ABILITIES proposal was:

to study, design and develop a federated architecture implemented by a set of intelligent and adaptive Universal Business Language (UBL) active messages (an Application Bus for EAI) and basic interoperability services, which aims at supporting SMEs EAI in e-commerce contexts, specifically in less developed Countries and less RTD intensive industrial sectors.

In particular, ABILITIES will address three research streams:

Orientation towards Enlarged Europe SMEs: starting from OASIS' (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) UBL specifications, defining a generic XML interchange format for business documents to support a typical order-to-invoice procurement cycle, ABILITIES will make UBL suitable for Enlarged Europe industrial SMEs and will change, extend, and adapt UBL where necessary for this purpose;
Federated Architecture and Intelligent Business Documents: provide support for the architecture that ISO 14258 (International Standard prepared by Technical Committee 184) identifies as federated (on-the-fly reconciliation and mapping negotiation, as no reference meta-model can be developed), the most advanced and sophisticated solution from the ICT viewpoint, suitable for the less structured and advanced industrial cases, sectors and domains. Also in the presence of a reference meta-model for order-to-invoice business documents (UBL), ABILITIES will experiment an innovative blended architecture which could join the peculiar advantages of message-based Service Oriented Architectures and Intelligent Multi-Agent Systems, in a context where business documents become intelligent, interactive and multi-media objects;
Service Orchestration and Business Process support: Study and provide reconciliation between research and standards in business documents and research and standards in business process management;

In addition, ABILITIES tested and validated such technologies in real-life SMEs-driven business scenarios located in New Member States:

Collaborative business and co-operative work scenarios for small entrepreneurs (Retail and Tourism) in Lithuania;
Business process development and interconnection for High-Tech SMEs in Slovakia;
Mobile and ubiquitous work support in multi-customer distribution Agro-food SMEs networks in Turkey;
XML-based interactive and adaptive e-business Document exchange (MODA-ML) for the Textile-Clothing SMEs supply chain in Romania;
Semantic content reconciliation for Tourism SMEs in Hungary;

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