E-NVISIONing the participation of European construction SMEs in a future e-business scenario

The integration and automation of enterprise business processes are still nowadays an open issue especially for the SMEs. This has forced the research community to do research on technologies to provide a more automatic and collaborative arena for the enterprises. But still this complex but advanced knowledge has not reached in a practical way the SME real world, especially in the Construction sector. It is just this consideration what has motivated the e-NVISION* consortium to do a bottom-up approach research from the construction SMEs standpoint to a complete infrastructure definition of a collaborative SMEs trading lifecycle scenario over the (Semantic) Web. In this paper we provide the current state of the art on this matter identifying also open research issues and we also describe the construction SME trading framework that will allow us to define an SME-oriented e-Business Model formally expressed by a set ontologies and a set of business contextual services enabling SMEs to incorporate legal, social, economic, and trust aspects in their business model.