Summary
Semantics in Business Information Systems (SEBIS)
Business Information Systems (BIS) as a discipline addresses research questions resulting from the use of computer systems for business purposes. While its historical roots are proprietary and monolithic systems designed for the automated processing of mass transactions, the overall trend of the past decade has been a shift towards (1) a complex environment consisting of a grown combination of legacy systems and large, common-of-the-shelf application (COTS) packages (e.g. ERP libraries), (2) the organization-wide diffusion of IT into all kinds of business and service processes, and (3) the need to support automated interactions with a multiplicity of partners at various levels of detail. This has dramatically increased the complexity of managing IT use in business.
In our research group, we work at transferring Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services technology to research problems in Business Information Systems, in order to bridge the gap between the fundamental work yielded by the Formal Ontology and Semantic Web communities on one hand, and the application-oriented challenges of BIS/MIS as a discipline.
This includes but is not limited to using ontologies and machine-reasoning for the following tasks
- Ontology-supported Content Integration, especially Product Data Management, Catalog Integration, Spend Analysis, and E-Procurement
- Business Process Management
- Matchmaking
- Data and Knowledge Engineering Issues in Electronic Commerce and Electronic Business
While Business Information Systems as a discipline is application-oriented, it is our main aim to work according to high scientific standards, e.g. by yielding generic insights and sound methodologies instead of solving singular implementation issues. At the same time we regard requirements from real-world use cases as fundamental input for our work, because only this provides us with essential knowledge about the true complexity of the problems.