An interoperable e-business platform towards better integration of new member states SME's

This paper gives an overview of the federated integration approach based on an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Universal Business Language (UBL) messages. It was build and will be used within th eEU project called ABILITIES (Application Bus for InteroperabiLITy In enlarged Europe SME's). It is a two years project started 1st of January 2006. The peculiarity of ABILITIES is the high number of participants from New Member States (NMS). This is due to the fact that IT integration is not only a challenge in respect of finding according IT architectures, standards and services, but also in receiving the acceptance of end users. All together there are five test cases planed in different countries in different domains and emphasizing different aspects: - Collaborative business in Retail in Lithuania - Business Process Integration in High-Tech Incubator in Slovakia - Mobile Business support in agro-food industry in Turkey - XML Documents exchange in textile industry in Romania - Semantic Content Reconciliation in the tourism sector in Hungary Section 2 of this paper describes some of the main problems in NMS by the example of Lithuania. In section 3 the overall ABILITIES architectural approach to solve some of the most important integration problems is introduced. For digging more into detail on our approaches on Negotiaion, Collaboration and handling of Multimedia we refer to. Finally we compare with related works and provide first conclusions.