Teaching Business Systems to Agree

摘要

In Business-to-Business (B2B) commercial relationships, the exchange of messages relies heavily on standards. However, standards are in practice seldom sufficient. Nearly all bilateral commercial contracts need human negotiations, followed by expensive software integration to realize automated B2B message exchange. Accordingly, business systems integrations are nearly always to some extent hard coded. This prohibits widespread adoption of automated support of commercial B2B relations. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a handshake protocol to agree on the semantical aspects of the interface between the computers of independent organizations.