South-East European Research Centre (SEERC)

FUSION aims at promoting interconnection, interoperability, and collaboration among enterprises in the enlarged Europe, with a special focus in small and medium-sized enterprises. More specifically, the aim of the project is to deliver a novel approach and technological solution addressing the challenge of integrating heterogeneous business applications, and thus facilitating the cost-effective realisation of integrated collaborative business processes that may involve different enterprises or different divisions within a single enterprise.

The approach and technological solution to be delivered by FUSION is set to overcome several of the shortcomings inherent in today's existing solutions for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), by leveraging some of the latest research results and advancements from the domains of Service-Oriented Computing and Semantic Web technologies.

FUSION puts forward an approach for realising collaborative business processes which is set at (i) lowering the cost of integrating business applications and interconnecting enterprises, (ii) enabling enterprises to respond more quickly and flexibly to changing market conditions, (iii) supporting business growth and increasing the potential for an improved return on IT investments.

1. FUSION Reference Framework: The definition of an innovative approach for business process integration among and within enterprises having heterogeneous system infrastructures, and the conceptualization of the approach in the form of a reference framework.
2. FUSION Methodology: The development of a systematic methodology for the semantic fusion of service-oriented businesses applications, offering process guidance on the path to both intra- and inter-organisational Enterprise Application Integration.
3. FUSION Integration Mechanism: The realisation of a set of tools constituting an implementation of the FUSION Reference Framework and enabling users to perform all necessary activities towards the integration of business processes that rely on semantically-enabled service-oriented business applications.
4. FUSION Pilot Cases: The application of the overall solution to three individual cases of European enterprises that are in need of solutions for establishing intra- or inter-organisational collaborative business processes, thus validating the project results and proving the feasibility of the overall approach.