Project Impact

Enterprise Application Integration has been for years a major information technology concern for companies and organizations as well as the public sector worldwide. Recent studies estimate that up to 30% of future IT investments will be on systems integration efforts. This is because mergers require the integration of software infrastructure. New solutions like CRM and Business Intelligence need to cooperate with existing solutions and different vendor products are necessary to be compatible.
An innovative project like FUSION will therefore promote and contribute to the European integration process. FUSION will develop a generic approach, methodology and technological tools for the semantic integration of service-oriented business applications and prove the applicability of the above by addressing the semantic integration of heterogeneous business applications (ERP and CRM).

The FUSION research activities are expected to address business needs common in several European industries like e-collaboration, online transactions, integration of supply or value chains and integration of front-end and back-office applications. The satisfaction of any of the above requirements can affect drastically the productivity and competitiveness of companies and organizations. The potential integration of information systems over a semantic web network will promote electronic collaboration of SMEs clusters as well as B2B and B2C e-business for the integration of value chains, improvement of response times and reduction of cost.

Sectoral, social, cultural and regulatory boundaries can be surmounted due to the knowledge sharing at the semantic layer of the FUSION architecture. Furthermore, the perspective of automated business process modelling techniques, that the FUSION project plans to investigate by exploring the semantic web services technology, will allow businesses to communicate and conduct online transactions with one another with limited or no human intervention.

Consortium

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