Semantic-based integration of innovative networking services and existing systems

The degree of ICT adoption at small and micro companies is still unsatisfactory in most of the EU25 countries and the main barriers to ICT uptake are the lack of basic collaboration services available at reasonable conditions and the need for SMEs to change their current ICT tools. The paper shows how the SEAMLESS services, developed in the homologous FP6-IST project, put every SME in condition to exchange business documents with any other user SME, by overcoming format, language and meaning differences, and enable the user companies to cope with different eInvoicing infrastructures and marketplaces. The SEAMLESS approach addresses very important scenarios such as integration with ERP and SCM systems, with third-party applications providing added-value services to all the network users, with other sectoral, national and international business channels. A number of experiments carried out in the last months supported a preliminary evaluation of the business benefits generated by this easy, fast and cheap semantic-based integration approach.