Semantic representations for configurable enterprise systems

Abstract

Due to the variation of business practices from one company to another and the lack of flexibility to support different business practices, enterprise systems need to be customized based on the requirements of individual companies. Customization is one the major activities in the enterprise system implementation. It is mainly a process of redesigning and redeveloping functions of an enterprise information system for a particular company. The extra time required for customization definitely stretches the deployment cycle and increases the implementation cost. It is also a barrier that hampers companies to change their business practices for new business opportunities. Therefore, technologies for developing configurable enterprise systems with flexibility to adapt to business practices in different companies are gaining the attention of solution vendors and researchers. In this research, semantic representations were developed for configurable enterprise systems. These representations can enhance the flexibility of enterprise systems and make enterprise systems able to be rapidly tailored for different companies. The core of the concept is to decouple various logics from systems and represent the logics in a semantic manner. To achieve semantic representations, XML-based declarative language has been developed for representing a diversity of logics. The paper elaborates semantic representations of information entities, entity relationships, functional components and graphical environments. A business process management system based on the semantic representations is also briefly presented. Copyright © 2006 by ASME.