eBusiness

Integrating Semantic Web concepts into the domain of e-business is a hot<br> topic. However, most of the efforts spent so far concentrated on the<br> improvement on B2C (business-to-consumer) e-commerce applications,<br> achieved by semantic enrichment of information. With the growing<br> importance of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) companies started to<br> move into the section of the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), where<br> applications exchange their business information semi-automatically.<br> This B2B (business-to-business) electronic commerce is driven by<br> aligning the internal business processes of companies to publicly<br> available business processes. Thereby companies often do not consider<br> the economic drivers of their business processes, which leads to<br> incompatibilities between management, administration and technical<br> layers. This chapter covers the two major domains of e-business /<br> e-commerce, namely B2B and B2C. In the first, a model-driven<br> approach towards B2B IT solutions is introduced, covering semantic aspects dealing<br> with business models, business process models, and business document<br> models. In the second application domain, the basic concepts<br> of Semantic Web in the area of B2C electronic commerce are examined using a representative example from the e-tourism domain.