Flexible and adaptable process information sharing in business-to-business electronic commerce: federated database approaches

Abstract

This paper proposes the methodology through which independent business entities can share their process information with one another. The independent business entities have different business goals. Thus, in spite of their strategic alliance, they tend to be reluctant to share their core process information with one another. Besides, in agile organizations, their business relationships and internal business processes can be frequently changed to face the market environments. To meet such trends of modern business environments, in developing the methodology we especially reference the traditional federated database approaches and focus on two requirements for process information sharing, flexibility for representing the sharing policies established with respect to complex business relationships and adaptability for dealing with the dynamic changes of business relationships and internal business processes. Additionally, we suggest an object-oriented modeling to represent such sharing policies and shared process schemas.