The EXTERNAL experience on system and enterprise integration

The overall objective of the EXTERNAL project is to make it easier for business partners to form and operate extended enterprises as dynamic networked organisations. From a technical perspective, EXTERNAL, is largely a system integration project, in which a set of complementary tools are integrated into a Web-based knowledge sharing infrastructure to provide a comprehensive set of services for EE engineering and operation. As a result from our evolving understanding, we shifted from system integration and an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure towards enterprise integration and an intelligent Extended Enterprise infrastructure based on Active Knowledge Models.