Enabling B2B Transactions over the Internet through Application Interconnection: The PRAXIS Project

The paper elaborates on an approach that will enable the typical Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) to carry out a large subset of its business transactions with other enterprises, the public administration or financial institutions over the internet, gaining significant resources that nowadays are wasted on editing, printing, transferring and re-typing business documents. The present approach can be characterised as a depth-first, pilotoriented attempt to provide practical solutions to the Enterprise Application Interoperability problems of European SME’s and do so in a paradigmbuilding way. Part of the approach stems out of PRAXIS, a project cofunded by the 3rd Community Support Framework (CSF) under the Information Society Programme. The project, coordinated by Singular Software SA, brings together software vendors, research centres, public administration bodies, banking institutions and user companies in Greece, aiming to provide a solution that will allow the automation of the aforementioned transactions with significant productivity results for all the represented communities.