Towards B2B Integration in Telecommunications with Semantic Web Services

This paper describes BT Wholesale's B2B Gateway as an approach to provide Business­to­Business integration within the Telecommunications sector. Although the Gateway provides increased efficiency over separate systems, the process to allow business partners to integrate is lengthy and costly. The application of Semantic Web Services will ease the integration process. The Web Services Modelling Ontology is described and applied to the Gateway. The paper presents the initial requirements of the Gateway upon WSMO and proposes how WSMO could provide further benefit in the future. 1 Introduction Today's telecommunications industry is facing many challenges. After many years of high growth and profit the last few years has seen rapidly falling prices and increasingly intense competition. Operators (and in particular, the large incumbents) have realised that they must radically transform the way they do business in order to reduce costs and remain competitive. Currently the industry suffers from high manpower costs due to a lack of automation, poor time­to­market due to inflexible business processes and customer service which has suffered due to a lack of integrated support systems. On the other hand, customers are demanding integrated services, tailored to their specific needs. The market is becoming increasingly federated due both to regulatory pressures and to companies' attempts to catch market opportunities with tailored, bundled services. In this market, the number of Business­to­Business (B2B) relationships between telecommunications companies and specialist content and service providers has dramatically increased. The current recession, changing market and new technology has led many companies to radically rethink the way they operate. They have realised that the new environment requires tighter management of processes and the eradication of bureaucracy and duplication of effort and systems. These requirements can be met by B2B integration where companies expose interfaces to their processes and systems, thus allowing their partners to integrate. This process, however, can be time­ consuming and costly and can even result in proposed services being commercially