Interoperation Support for Electronic Commerce

| Nowadays it is more important than ever for companies to understand what their \core competences" are and how they can maintain their competitive advantage by forming alliances with partners to provide customers with services that knit together seamlessly. Entire value chains consisting of powerful business alliance partners will compete as single entities { ecosystems { for customers. This raises a multiplicity of technical problems with respect to the interoperability of business processes and systems, across diverse enterprises, in an integrated value chain.