The role of B2B engines in B2B integration architectures

Semantic B2B Integration architectures must enable enterprises to communicate standards-based B2B events like purchase orders with any potential trading partner. This requires not only back end application integration capabilities to integrate with e.g. enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems as the company-internal source and destination of B2B events, but also a capability to implement every necessary B2B protocol like Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), RosettaNet as well as more generic capabilities like web services (WS). This paper shows the placement and functionality of B2B engines in semantic B2B integration architectures that implement a generic framework for modeling and executing any B2B protocol. A detailed discussion shows how a B2B engine can provide the necessary abstractions to implement any standard-based B2B protocol or any trading partner specific specialization.