Tool support for realising a common understanding of business documents in collaborating enterprises

A common understanding of business documents is important for realizing interoperability among collaborating enterprises. In this paper we explore the mental model of administrative staff in business enterprises to unravel how they map information items from business documents to the elements of an ontology of core business concepts. The data for our study has been gathered by organizing three focus groups. The results provide an insight into how users map and classify business documents. The findings of the user studies are fed into the design and development of a visual data mapping tool that enables users to create mapping between sets of information items and their own document taxonomy, thus classifying the incoming documents according to their local practices and needs.