Enabling B2B transactions over the Internet through Application Interconnection: The PRAXIS Project

The idea

The interoperability work of the time addressed large organisations, usually as a bespoke fix for legacy systems. But 97% of Greek enterprises — and 93% across the European Union — are small or very small, and they are the ones sending transaction documents by post and fax, or at best typing them into someone else's web form. The paper characterises its own approach as depth-first and pilot-oriented: solve the real transactions of real SMEs, in a way that can serve as a paradigm, rather than generalise first.

Contributions

• An approach letting a typical SME carry out a large subset of its transactions — with other businesses, with public administration and with financial institutions — over the internet, recovering the effort now spent editing, printing, transferring and re-typing documents.
• The PRAXIS project as its vehicle: a consortium of software vendors, research centres, public administration bodies, banks and user companies, coordinated by a commercial software house.

Where it sits

The same text also appears as a book chapter. The implementation account that followed a year later is the eChallenges 2005 experience report, and the modelling side is the PAKM paper.