Abstract
One of the most important reasons behind the failure of the previous generations of Business to Business (B2B) e-Commerce hubs was their solutions architectures. These B2B solutions architectures did not match the requirements of a business environment that needs flexible and innovative approaches to interact with market changes, business procedures, competition and day-to-day business practices. The paper uses the EDI Reference model, which is provided by the ISO organization to analyze the challenges of the architectures of B2B e-Commerce hubs. These challenges are summarized in: (A) a document-centric focus rather than business-process focus; (B) the complexity of creating new business models, or business services at runtime; (C) the interoperability limitations, and the data transformation challenges. The research presents a proposed architecture to build solutions architectures for B2B e-Commerce hubs. The proposed solution creates a clear, automatic path between the business specification layer and the technical implementation layer by combining both a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and management views in a single framework. The paper assesses the capabilities of the proposed architecture in building vertical B2B e-Marketplaces by applying the proposed architecture to the building of a vertical B2B e-Marketplace for the Oil and Gas sector. Further decomposition of the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) with semantic match making (reasoning techniques) has not been covered completely in the scope of this research, and future research can be extended to enhance this architecture.
