Networked Peers for Business

Project Goals

NeP4B aims at contributing innovative ICTs solutions for SMEs, by developing an advanced technological infrastructure to enable companies of any nature, size and geographic location to search for partners, exchange data, negotiate and collaborate without limitations and constraints.

Economic and organizational goals of NeP4B are:

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  • framing the economic and organizational relationships between ICTs, business processes and performance, for internetworked SMEs;
  • analysis of collaboration issues emerging from software and human-centred business processes within multi-party operations management systems that aim to transform the supply networks;
  • developing a trust model coherent with a scenario in which several business players can meet in a virtual environment and need to decide whether a participant is trusted for a business transaction.

Business knowledge representation and modelling goals based on natural language are:

• providing the semantic peers with advanced and possibly automated functions for effective acquisition, categorisation, organisation, sharing and use of the business knowledge (mainly expressed in natural language);
• extracting relevant knowledge from textual documents, describing the business logic of the company.

CEFRIEL Contribution

• A Web Service Discovery engine that exdents Glue WSMO Discovery Engine to NFP and that distributes Glue upon multiple node
• Development of a trust model in which several business players can meet in a virtual environment and need to decide whether a participant is trusted for a business transaction
• A Semantic Navigation system

Research Units

• Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia
• CEFRIEL
• Università di Milano – Bicocca
• Consiglio nazionale delle ricerche (CNR) - ISTI
  

Project web site: http://dbgroup.unimo.it/nep4b/en/index.htm