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A main problem for electronic commerce, particularly for business-to-business applications, lies in the need for the involved information systems to meaningfully exchange information. Domain-specific standards may be used to define the semantics of common terms. However, in practice it is not easy to find those domain-specific standards that are detailed and stable enough to allow for real interoperability. Therefore, we propose an architecture that allows for incremental construction of a shared repository including a multilingual thesaurus, which is used in a business communication language. Communicating information systems then refer to the common thesaurus while exchanging messages. Our emphasis is be on separating semantics (in the thesaurus) and syntax (in XML). Therefore, our extensibility is not only that of XML, but also the extensibility of the semantics that is modeled in the shared repository. The business communication language XLBC is presented and how it can be used in electronic commerce applications. XLBC message patterns and conversation protocols are stored in the shared repository as well.

Scientific modeling provides mathematical abstractions of real-world systems and builds software as implementations of these mathematical abstractions. Ocean science is a multidisciplinary discipline developing scientific models and simulations as ocean system models that are an essential research asset. In software engineering and information systems research, modeling is also an essential activity. In particular, business process modeling for business process management and systems engineering is the activity of representing processes of an enterprise, so that the current process may be analyzed, improved and automated. In this paper, we employ process modeling for analyzing scientific software development in ocean science to advance the state in engineering of ocean system models and to better understand how ocean system models are developed and maintained in ocean science. We interviewed domain experts in semi-structured interviews, analyzed the results via thematic analysis, and modeled the results via the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). The processes modeled as a result describe an aspired state of software development in the domain, which are often not (yet) implemented. This enables existing processes in simulation-based system engineering to be improved with the help of these process models.

With component-based software engineering, it is expected that software systems can be created and maintained at lower costs and with increased stability through reuse of approved components in flexible software architectures. We survey the state-of-the-art of this approach, hereby discussing issues such as reuse, architecture, various forms of component integration, component middleware, and impact on the development process.