Towards a Global Real-Time Enterprise

Abstract

Frictionless interoperation of business processes even across enterprise boundaries, complete up-to-date view of the overall status, and full remote control over the business parameters for individuals in charge – this is the holy grail of a “global real-time enterprise”. Yet a vision, a number of enabling technologies brought us closer to accomplishing the challenges: Sensing the position of mobile objects and processes status, distributing the status information with “zero latency”, discovering it according to specific demands across organisation boundaries, providing and securing uniform service-oriented access to all kinds of entities ranging from smart items to business processes, and aggregating the overwhelming variety of elementary services to form high-value composite services. In this chapter, we overview the enabling technologies that drive the development and further discuss market factors, security and privacy concerns, and standardization processes that have to be considered. Then we propose our SEMALON approach – the SEMAntic LOcation Network – intended as a basic infrastructure for discovery and composition of location based services. Finally we describe our experiences from a case study implementation – the NOMADS Campus – which is a distributed spatial information system for our campus at Humboldt University Berlin.