Accounting Agent System (FeeFee) to exploit ebXML

August 23, 2005 By Rob O'Neill, FairfaxDigital

Professor George Mickhail says his virtual accountant, Feefee, has a serious side.

Virtual Feefee has a sense of fun, according to her creator, University of Wollongong senior lecturer George Mickhail. But as an early prototype virtual accountant, she also has a serious side that stands as a warning to the accounting profession that basic functions can be automated. Professor Mickhail says Feefee gives users information in the way they prefer. And she won't be deskbound, either. My research project is to provide it through a mobile device," he says. That research uses a protocol called ebXML (electronic business extensible markup language), a standard way to exchange business messages and data. Professor Mickhail is seeking funding to take his project possibly to the point where he could make the first implementation of a robotic "virtual autonomic accountant".

Vietnam looks to ebXML to help companies boost exports

The Ministry of Trade has established the National E-commerce Portal of Vietnam (ECVN) that is offering free services until 2007 that include ebXML-based B2B transaction handling that are aimed at boosting Vietnamese business use of e-commerce.

The focus on standards for electronic data exchange includes EDFACR and ebXML, as well as PKI and other modern technologies. The complete press release and links are available at the ECVN. The Ministry of Trade offers different forms of support to enterprises to join the portal. Participating in the ECVN is a good way to promote enterprises’ image to international business partners.

Collaborative Business Process Support in IHE XDS through ebXML Business Processes

Asuman Dogac, Veli Bicer, Alper Okcan, Software Research and Development Center, Middle East Technical University (METU), 06531 Ankara Turkiye, asuman @ srdc.metu.edu.tr

ABSTRACT

Currently, clinical information is stored in all kinds of proprietary formats through a multitude of medical information systems available on the market. This results in a severe interoperability problem in sharing electronic healthcare records.

To address this problem, an industry initiative, called “Integrating Healthcare Enterprise (IHE)” has specified the “Cross Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS)” Profile to store healthcare documents in an ebXML registry/repository to facilitate their sharing.

Through a separate effort, IHE has also defined interdepartmental Workflow Profiles to identify the transactions required to integrate information flow among several information systems. Although the clinical documents stored in XDS registries are obtained as a result of executing these workflows, IHE has not yet specified collaborative healthcare processes for the XDS. Hence, there is no way to track the workflows in XDS and the clinical documents produced through the workflows are manually inserted into the registry/repository.

Given that IHE XDS is using the ebXML architecture, the most natural way to integrate IHE Workflow Profiles to IHE XDS is using ebXML Business Processes (ebBP). In this paper, we describe the implementation of an enhanced IHE architecture demonstrating how ebXML Business Processes, IHE Workflow Profiles and the IHE XDS architecture can all be integrated to provide collaborative business process support in the healthcare domain.

New Community ebMS V2.0 deployment profiles available

When a community, industry or group of trading partners adopt ebXML and ebMS-based exchanges they need to develop a common reference set of templates for ensuring consist interactions using ebXML.

The ebMS 2.0 Deployment Profile Template is now available that greatly simplifies that process.

The template is intended to be filled or extended by user communities with material and options that is either industry-specific, or sets partner preferred options.

The OASIS ebXML IIC TC plans to continue this work with releasing more template documents to facilitate the definition of deployment profiles for other ebXML specifications by user communities.

The specifications and example templates are available from the ebXML IIC documents resources:

New release of Hermes Open Source ebMS Server

A new release of the Hermes ebMS server 1.0.0.1 for ebXML messaging is now available. The new release adds solid enhancements to the existing Hermes platform with better handling for large message attachments, enhanced digital signature certificates, and better SQL database interaction handling.

The new release can be downloaded from the project site - http://www.freebxml.org

Latest freebXML Registry V3.0 beta released

The freebXML Registry team (formerly ebxmlrr team) has announced availability of their royalty-free open source implementation of the ebXML Registry standard specifications.

The new version provides a near, feature complete implementation of Registry Full conformance profile for the OASIS ebXML Registry 3.0 [4] standard. The only missing feature is support for Single Sign On (SSO)based on the Registry SAML Profile.

For more details see the documentation for the release is available at:
http://ebxmlrr.sourceforge.net/3.0

Information Access Mechanisms and ebXML Registry

Several projects are in progress using ebXML Registry to implement information management of content systems. The concepts around one EU funded project can be found here: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/guy-rvw/

The UN/CEFACT work on CCTS and Registry can be accessed here:
http://www.disa.org/cefact-groups/icg/

And then the FreebXML project is developing a Java API for Vocabulary Management, using the freebXML Registry and the JAXR API. The project was initially based on the ebXML Core Components specification and aims to provide means to facilitate the work of domain experts managing data dictionaries.

More information available from: http://ebxmlcc.sourceforge.net/