Semantic Services for Business Documents Reconciliation

This chapter intends to report about the ongoing activities in the COIN European project concerning semantic reconciliation of business documents for supporting interoperability of software applications in an e-government and e-business scenarios. The approach is based on a reference ontology against which business documents are mapped through semantic annotation and building of reconciliation rules. The work starts from the semantic reconciliation suite developed in the ATHENA European project and intends to improve the suite by providing an automatic support to the definition of mappings. In order to do that, three automatic services have been developed: (i) semantic annotation of business documents; (ii) definition of transformation rules; (iii) rules optimization and fusion. A running example concerning the exchange of a legal verification document in a scenario of cross border cooperation between European chambers of commerce will guide through the description of the services.