Business objects in construct IT

Objective: EU Esprit Project 25.741 Wonda aims to meet the needs for Enterprise Information Systems and E-Commerce in the construction and banking industries. Wonda aims to deliver a solution suitable for contracting firms. The solution should enable take-up by SMEs, incremental value-added growth (perhaps Incremental Radicalism), mobile computing for location independent access by project managers and quick set-up of virtual enterprises reflecting both the short customer-supplier relationships in the industry and the need of construction firms to constantly re-configure and re-invent themselves. Method: Wonda will develop an open and secure framework for business objects and electronic payment. Business objects can be defined as software components, which encapsulate business rules and procedures and which can run anywhere on the network. They provide secure and sophisticated access to diverse electronic content and software applications. Indeed, just as a building can be described as a unique arrangement of standard products, a building project can be described as a unique arrangement of standard product data. Business Objects give a high level view of product data. They can be assembled into frameworks to support high-level views on industrial projects. The open framework will enable a distributed architecture through CORBA thus facilitating the interoperation of heterogeneous software components as found in legacy systems. The modular security of the framework and its support for electronic payment ensure authenication, confidentiality and non-repudiation as required for the business processes of construction virtual enterprises. Indeed the modular and incremental implemenation of security will be achieved partly through a Business Object architecture. Results will comprise o a pilot in 2 product cycles, o an open & secure framework architecture, o Commotion middleware for enabling business objects on top of Corba, o WeBuild (construction), WeBank (banking) and SILK (security) business objects o OpenDMX component to enable object orientated access to legacy databases.