An architecture to support distributed trade documents

By integrating the many different technologies and approaches involved in electronic education and commerce, we can effectively support advanced applications in these areas. This paper describes an architecture which can be used to facilitate the specification, execution, and distribution of incremental trade documents among heterogeneous interchanges. We argue that the conventional, top-down, centralized approach to workflow, in its current state, is not suitable to support the undetermined nature of an advanced trade application. What this approach lacks is a unified object-oriented model which can be used to design interoperable trading systems with a single set of well-defined abstractions. This paper, in an attempt to overcome the limitations imposed by the conventional approach, presents an overview of principles relating to object interoperability, semantic heterogeneity, and the document-centric paradigm associated with trade documents. A view object model and its relevant components are also discussed