Frameworks Integration Guideline. The main objective of the ECIMF project is to provide clear guidelines and methodologies for building interoperability bridges between different incompatible e- commerce standards. This section presents a general guideline to solving this issue in case of two incompatible e-commerce frameworks F1 and F2. Annex 1 gives additional supporting information. The guideline has been divided into several steps, to be performed sequentially and iteratively, as needed. The steps follow the methodology described in the previous section – the layers on the top are addressed first, since they give the broadest context necessary for understanding of the lower-level data transformations. The successful completion of all steps will result in a set of interoperability rules, enforced by a framework mediating agent, which will allow parties using different frameworks to cooperate towards common business goals. Build Business Context Model Build Business Context Matching Model Build Business Context Model Build Semantic Model Build Semantic Translation Model Build Semantic Model Build Business Process Model Build Process Mediation Model Build Business Process Model Build Syntax Model Build Syntax Mapping Model Build Syntax Model Generate MANIFEST refine refine refine refine Figure 11 The process of modeling the integration recipes between two e-commerce frameworks. The guideline has a modular structure, reflected in the fact that in each step several so-called alternative procedures have been defined. Each alternative procedure refers to a well-defined unit of work that needs to be done (a part of integration step), and allows you to replace or extend the approach suggested for that step with other methods of your choice, as long as they provide you with similar results (artifacts) as the input to the next step. The boundaries of each alternative procedure are clearly marked, and the input/output deliverables are specified. You can also find a common meta-model defined in each of the steps, which serves as a common vocabulary (shared ontology) for understanding the incompatible frameworks. One important thing to note here is that the integration modeling between two frameworks is asymmetric, i.e. the integration model will usually contain two elements that refer to the same individual model elements, but defined differently depending on the direction in which the data is traveling. The subsections below present the details of the guideline.
