The success of organizations and business networks depends on fast and well-founded decisions taken by the relevant people in their specific area of responsibility. To enable timely and well-founded decisions, it is often necessary to perform ad-hoc analyses in a collaborative manner involving domain experts, line-of-business managers, key suppliers, or customers. Current Business Intelligence (BI) solutions fail to meet the challenges of ad-hoc and collaborative decision support, thus slowing down and hurting organizations. To move towards ad-hoc and collaborative BI, we envision a highly scalable and flexible BI platform. The main building blocks of this platform are a flexible and efficient concept for the management of business context information, an intuitive and powerful methodology for the configuration of a BI system, a concept of an information self-service for business users over data sources within and across organizations, a collaborative decision making environment, and an architecture for the whole system that complements current BI systems.

The success of organizations or business networks depends on fast and well-founded decisions taken by the relevant people in their specific area of responsibility. To enable timely and well-founded decisions, it is often necessary to perform ad-hoc analyses in a collaborative manner involving domain experts, line-of-business managers, key suppliers or customers. Current Business Intelligence (BI) solutions fail to meet the challenges of ad-hoc and collaborative decision support, slowing down and hurting organizations. The main goal of our envisioned system, which will be designed and implemented in a future research project, is to realize a highly scalable and flexible platform for collaborative, ad-hoc BI over large data sets. This will be achieved by developing methodologies, concepts and an infrastructure to enable an information self-service for business users and collaborative decision making over high-volume data sources within and across organizations.

An industry distribution model provides an important reference point for enterprises to extend business scope, and for governments to make industrial area planning. Current industry development models usually ignore the spatial distribution of enterprises, or build the models in virtual spaces. This paper proposes an iterating Model of Industry development in Real Space (MIRS) based on national division standards. Utilizing a multi-level iterating structure and a random concentration distribution approach, MIRS presents the fractal characteristics of log-normal distribution, self-similarity, and increasing trend of fractal information dimension. The coincidence between MIRS and actual industries is verified by the data collected from three industries in China, this allows MIRS to be an effective approach for predicting industry behaviors and a quantitative reference for decision-makers of companies.

This paper presents the results of the STASIS(www.stasis-project.net) project and applies it to the area of semantic interoperability within technology enhanced learning platforms. Within the paper an innovative approach for creating a comprehensive application suite is introduced which allows partners to simplify the mapping process between data schemas of different e-Learning platforms. This mapping allows users to easily transfer content from one e-Learning platform to another and hence making it much easier to reuse e-Learning objects and to update to new e-Learning environments without spending serious resources on manual migration of content and user models.

Within this paper the STASIS approach for creating a comprehensive application suite is introduced which allows enterprises to simplify the mapping process between data schemas based on semantics as opposed to syntax. This paper initially introduces the current schema mapping problem and outlines the limitations of existing solutions. The STASIS approach is then presented and contrasted with other semantic projects.

E-Business information systems require effective inclusion of semantics to function, Emerging messaging systems, such as ebXML, need to include structural support for these semantics. In order to develop an ontology based approach to this task, we have undertaken several case studies and used the results to derive generic use cases for the ontology based e-business semantics development. This paper describes the results of these case studies and the comparison of sectors that will be used to inform the generic use case development. Finally we propose a solution to this semantic problem that will enable the publication and synchronisation of business messaging semantics as utilised by participating organisations in a distributed web architecture.

Electronic markets support organisations by providing services to find business partners to collaborate with and by providing a secure way of communicating and exchanging business information. This paper introduces the Single European Electronic Market (SEEM) concept and focuses on the development and definition of SEEM-enabling infrastructures. It therefore defines requirements for Such an infrastructure and afterwards it gives an example for a realization by describing the inaugural SEEMseed project, which is based upon a distributed registry infrastructure. The paper is completed by a report of first experiences and results of the described project.