The Business Scenario

Throughout Europe, much of the industrial fabric is made of small and medium- sized enterprises (SMEs) in fields such as agriculture, manufacturing, commerce and services. For social and historical reasons, these tend to aggregate into sectorial clusters in various parts of respective countries. Today, this kind of economic organization is threatened by globalisation.

One of the keys to sustainability and success is being able to access information. This could be a cheaper supplier, an innovative working method, a new market, potential clients, partners, sponsors, and so on. Current Internet search tools are inadequate because they not only are they difficult to use, the search results are often of little use with their pages and pages of hits.

Suppose an SME needs to find out about a topic - a product, a supplier, a fashion trend, a standard, etc. For example, a search is made for 'fabric dyeing processes' for the purpose of finding out about the disposal of the dyeing waste material. A query to www.google.com for 'fabric dyeing' listed 44.600 hits at the time of writing, which related not only manufacturers of fabric dyeing equipment, but also the history of dyeing, the dyeing technology, and so on. Eventually a useful contact may be found, and the search can continue for relevant laws and standards concerning waste disposal. But is it law or the interpretation of the law? What if the laws are of a different country where the practices and terminologies are different?

 

The SEWASIE Architecture

A user should be able to access the SEWASIE system through a central user interface where (s)he are provided with tools for query composition, for personalising search results and other web data, for visualising results, and for communicating with other business partners about search results, e.g. in electronic negotiations.

SEWASIE Information Nodes (SINodes) are mediator-based systems, providing a virtual view of the information sources managed within a SINode. Each SINode exports an ontology that represents the metadata of its virtual view. These ontologies are further integrated in Brokering Agents which build the bridge between the SINodes and the user interface. The user interface transfers queries to the Query Agents that are intelligent information agents with the specific task of solving a query. The query agents will use the Brokering Agents to get metadata about the SINodes, i.e. to identify the SINodes which have to queried to answer a specific query. Monitoring Agents filter and contextualise answers of the Query Agent, possibly linked to OLAP reports. They serve also as intelligent filters, which monitor Web sites of competitors or potential collaborators. Finally, the Communication Tool provides the means for structured web-based communication. It uses query results, contextualised information and ontologies from SINodes as the basis for the communicative content. The Communication Agent performs communication tasks in the early phase of electronic interactions.