Improving Inter-Enterprise Collaboration with Recommendation Tool based on Lightweight Semantics in Emails

In current time of web and mobile applications, classic email is still one of the most popular means of communication over the Internet. Beset by many problems such as spam or information overload, yet it yields significant benefits especially to enterprise users when communicating, collaborating or solving business tasks. In addition, the current groupware frameworks still does not support well the collaboration between large and small & medium-sized enterprises. In this paper, we present an approach that addresses the challenges of inter-enterprise collaboration, putting together email as a tool for information sharing and lightweight semantics to automate the processing of the knowledge extracted from the emails and their attachments. The building blocks of our approach are: connectors to legacy applications retaining current working styles, use of email for collaboration especially on the SME’s side, information extraction enabling semantic search and recommendation in inter-enterprise collaborations, automatic tagging of documents, and integration of existing business process models. To evaluate our approach we use three different scenarios: new product development, software development supply chain, and supply chain collaboration between SMEs and LEs. Evaluation results suggests that our solution is a benefit for the collaborating enterprises.