Protecting the Exchange of Document Images in Cross-Enterprise Process Integration with Web Services

There is now an increasing demand for sharing document images and image data for process integration among enterprises. Web services technology has recently been widely proposed and gradually adopted as a platform for supporting integrations. There are so far no holistic solutions to tackle the various protection issues in this area, especially regarding the security and privacy protection requirements in cross-enterprise progress integration. We propose the exchange of document images through a Document Image Exchange Platform (DIEP), replacing ad-hoc and manual exchange practices. We show how contemporary technologies of Web services and watermarking can help archive images with layered implementation architecture. Through dedicated Web services technologies with watermarking mechanism, not only can the development, deployment, and maintenance of software be streamlined, the privacy protection in document image exchanges as required by disparate processes can also be much facilitated.