Business document exchange between small companies

This chapter is aimed at presenting a practical approach, and its technological implementation, for enabling small companies to exchange business documents in different formats and languages with minimal impact on their legacy systems and working practices. The proposed solution differs from the general-purpose or theoretical approaches reported in other chapters of this book as it is intended to focus on the basic interoperability requirements of small companies in their real life. Special attention is spent to show how to define a minimal reference ontology, use it for annotating the data fields in legacy systems, and map it onto existing standards in order to remove the cultural and technical obstacles for small companies to join the global electronic market. These techniques have been studied and prototyped, and are presently validated, by some EU-funded projects.