Article Preview
TopIntroduction
Earlier work, based on a survey, has shown that quality of semantic standards, in the information systems domain, is improvable (Folmer, Oude Luttighuis, et al., 2011). The results of that survey indicate that quality is not properly addressed in current standardization practice, and this reduces standards’ quality, and therefore interoperability (Folmer, 2012). This work will present a quality model for semantic standards, an instrument that although requested by the developers and owners of semantic standards did not exist upfront (Folmer, Berends, et al., 2010). In other domains, such as product engineering, software engineering, or data, there has been a longstanding history on the topic of quality, resulting in many quality models.
Our comprehensive research process included a vast amount of literature from these domains, and resulted in an earlier published book containing the state of the art (Folmer & Verhoosel, 2011). Amongst other models from Juran, Deming and Crosby (product engineering), ISO 9126 & 25000 and CMM (software engineering), Delone and McLean (Information Systems) and Wand & Wang (Data), have been identified and are being used in our design approach for a quality model of semantic standards.
The design approach consisted of 7 iterations of build and evaluate, and is in full described in (Folmer, 2011; Folmer, 2012). This article will focus on the outcome of the research process, with relative short attention to the problem setting, literature and evaluation of the product.
In this research we focus on semantic information system standards (in short: semantic standards), a relatively new area of standardization. Semantic standards reside at the presentation and application layer of the OSI model (Steinfield, Wigand, Markus, & Minton, 2007). They include business transaction standards, inter-organizational information system (IOS) standards, ontologies, vocabularies, messaging standards, document-based, e-business, horizontal (cross-industry) and vertical industry standards. The often-used examples are RosettaNet for the electro technical industry, HealthLevel7 for the health care domain, HR-XML for the human resources industry and Universal Business Language (UBL) for procurement. Semantic standards are designed to promote communication and coordination among organizations; these standards may address product identification, data definitions, business document layout, and/or business process sequences (adapted from (Steinfield et al., 2007)). Both point to point and hub IT architectures might facilitate this standards-based communication and coordination between organizations (Steinfield, Markus, & Wigand, 2011b).
Löwer (2005) sums up the different terms used for what he calls inter-organizational standards, which to a large extent are synonyms: “Inter-organizational System Standards and Process Innovations”, “Open E-Business Standards”, “Standards for Domain-Specific Interoperability”, “Vertical Industry Languages”, “Vertical IS Standards”, “XML-Based E-Business Frameworks” and “XML-based E-Business Standards”.
When developing a quality model our top goal is defined as “Support semantic SSOs (Standard Setting Organizations) in developing high quality standards” which has been decomposed into three level-two goals, which have been further decomposed and can best be summarized as (Folmer, Krukkert, et al. 2010): Usefulness for different semantic SSOs, efficient to use, and usable end results.