iSURF eDoCreator: e-Business Document Design and Customization Environment Fulya TUNÇER 1 , Asuman DOGAC 2 , Yıldıray KABAK 2 , Şenan POSTACI 1 , Suat GÖNÜL 1 , Erdem ALPAY 1 1 Dept. of Computer Engineering, Middle East Technical University, İnönü Bulvari, Ankara, 06531, Turkey Tel: +90 312 2102076, Fax: + 90 312 2105572, {fulya,senan,suat,erdem}@srdc.metu.edu.tr 2 Software Research, Development and Consultancy Ltd., METU-KOSGEB Tekmer, Ankara, 06531, Turkey Tel: +90 312 2105598, Fax: + 90 312 2101259, {asuman,yildiray}@srdc.com.tr Abstract. The leading effort for creating a standard semantic basis for business documents to solve electronic business document interoperability problem came from the UN/CEFACT (United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business) Core Components Technical Specification (CCTS) through a document modeling methodology. Currently, the main challenge in using UN/CEFACT CCTS based approaches is that the document artifacts are stored in spreadsheets and this makes it very difficult to discover the previously defined components and to check their consistency. Furthermore, businesses need to customize standard documents according to their specific needs. The first XML implementation of UN/CEFACT CCTS, namely, Universal Business Language (UBL) provides detailed text-based descriptions of customization mechanisms. However without automated tool support, it is difficult to apply the customization and to maintain the consistency of the customizations. iSURF eDoCreator tool addresses these problems by providing an online common UN/CEFACT CCTS based document component modeling repository which integrates the machine processable version of paper-based UBL customization guidelines. In this way, iSURF eDoCreator environment aims to maximize re-use of available document building blocks and minimize the tedious document design and customization efforts. The environment also proved to be very useful in performing the gap analysis between different customizations of UBL. 1. Introduction Interoperability is the ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged [1]. With the recent technological developments such as Web services, a degree of interoperability at the transport and the communication layer has been achieved. Yet the interoperability of exchanged documents is still a difficult problem. Several standard interfaces have been developed to provide the interoperability of Electronic Business Documents [2]. However, having more than one standard hampers interoperability because the business organizations using different standards still suffer from the interoperability problem. Furthermore, even the businesses that use the same standard tailor it for their specific needs because they have different rules and requirements for the information they exchange according to the industry domain they operate and their geopolitical and regulatory contexts. As a result, there is an interoperability challenge even for the communities that use the different customizations of the same document standard. The leading effort for creating a standard semantic basis for business documents to solve electronic business document interoperability problem came from the UN/CEFACT (United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business) Core Components Technical