by private and public organizations, in support of their electronic collaborative business transactions is still relatively low, especially among Small and Medium-sized Enterprises. Current solutions often lack a common understanding of the underlying business processes, document semantics and business rules that are imposed on them in different sectors and countries. Furthermore, software applications are not able to cope with the huge variety of differentiation in process and document semantics, stemming from the highly diverse requirements of the stakeholders. This study presents a comprehensive Model-Driven Architecture for enabling agile cross-organisational collaboration, in an international context, by integrating business and legal rules in private and collaborative processes, business documents and their resulting service orchestrations. The resulting framework, that was mostly developed and applied in the course of the EU-funded research project GENESIS, ranges from graphical process and data models and declarative rule structures to the technical specification of a hybrid software architecture for integrating rule with process and data models.

identified as the ones that were able to adapt their processes and ways of conducting business to the needs of their environment and the technological achievements of their times. This statement has not changed during recent years, but today, due to the major breakthrough of the internet and the possibilities it offers for a unified electronic marketplace, enterprises have to take advantage of the new technological tools offered, in order not only to adapt to this new emerging environment, but also to benefit from it and expand their operations in parallel with minimising costs. Achieving interoperability of the various production systems, and not only enabling hard-wired connectivity, seems to be the key that will unlock the gates leading to this newly established global market, and therefore enterprises need to focus more on their already established processes in order to be able to formulate a global standard for executing business transactions and cooperating smoothly with each other.

issues still remain unsolved. As various initiatives trying to address how the underlying business information should be modelled, named and structured are being realised throughout the world, the importance of moving towards a holistic approach in eBusiness magnifies. In this paper, an attempt to clarify between the standards prevailing in the area is performed and the XML Data Standards providing generic XML Schemas are presented. Based on this “XML Data Standards Map”, a multi-faceted classification mechanism is proposed, leading to an extensible taxonomy of standards. A set of facets is analyzed for each standard, allowing for their classification based on their scope, completeness, compatibility with other standards, openness, ability to modify the schemas and maturity, to name a few. Through populating and querying this multi-faceted classification, a common understanding of Data Integration Standards can be ensured and the choice of a standard according to the requirements of each business can be systematically addressed.

many European member states, their operation in converging regions is still a problem. Socio-economic conditions, familiarisation with new democratic processes and low penetration of information technology still pose barriers for these eParticipation applications and their successful deployment calls for joint participation and cooperation of citizens and organisational bodies in order to form a unified framework consisting of guidelines and common codes of ethics. This paper presents a case study of the establishment of an eParticipation platform based on the cooperation of national news agencies in the converging regions of the Balkans.

along with the continuous advancements in ICT, push enterprises and administrations to move towards networked paradigms and leverage electronic transactions in their everyday practices. Although technical solutions providing the necessary interoperability means to enable such practices have been rigorously provided during the last years, their adoption and application by the foregoing stakeholders still remains limited. Several qualities of the existing solutions in technical and business level concerning the way the manage workflows, data mappings, business and legal rules along with the use of proprietary technologies and their inability to be readily set up and deployed, act as the main inhibitors for any potential users. The present work discusses the characteristics of the predominant centralized and decentralized architectural patterns for eTransactions, identifies the weak points of every case and proposes a hybrid architectural approach that brings together the "best of breed" of both paradigms. Additionally, specific insights, methodologies and underlying technologies are proposed with an objective to support the effective implementation of the proposed architecture and its basic components.

most active point of transactions between the state governments and the citizens. This fact emphasises the importance of services offered by Public Administrations and in the modern technological era, it is essential for Information Technology to provide solutions for transforming these traditionally offered services into electronic transactions that could be initiated over the Internet, aiming at the facilitation of the citizen's life, who is the eventual "client" of any government.. Although public administrations have strived over the last few years to meet this goal, their individual attempts resulted in isolated, ad-hoc systems, offering a small piece of the whole service bouquet. As the connectivity generated by the Internet is opening new opportunities in service delivery, public administrations are seeking ways to deliver integrated value-adding services though an Interoperable environment. The goal of a systematic service composition, which will guarantee eGovernment Interoperability, can be accomplished with an effective method of modeling the public services, in order to expose their interfaces and their actual workflow. Applying this method in Greek Municipalities by respecting the context of the emerging Greek eGovernment Interoperability Services Framework, various services have been analyzed, leading to corresponding generic process patterns.