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News Release

iSOCO creates the unique electronic invoice

04 February 2010 iSOCO Lab

iSOCO has released i2Ont, a prototype for the development of what will become the first electronic invoicing system to allow for electronic invoice exchange between companies transparently from and regardless their original formats and systems.

Since a European directive back in 2002 was approved permitting the electronic exchange of invoices between organizations, many have incorporated solutions based on proprietary ERP systems that allow this process to be undertaken. Although such systems provide large savings in terms of the time required for introducing and processing invoice data, they also require a significant initial investment in technology. Furthermore, each system has its own invoice representation formats and models, hampering the processing of invoices created in an alternative format.

Addressing this problem has been the objective of the research carried out by iSOCO Lab, the research and development centre of iSOCO, as part of the four-year European project NeOn.  NeOn is a 14.7 million Euros project involving 14 European partners and co-funded by the European Commission’s Sixth Framework Programme under grant number IST-2005-027595. NeOn started in March 2006 and has a duration of 4 years and its aim is to advance the state of the art in semantic technologies for large-scale applications in the distributed organizations. 

According to José Manuel Gómez-Pérez, R&D Director at iSOCO, the main contribution of i2Ont lies on the ability to support the automatic conversion of electronic invoices across different formats and models without requiring any ad-hoc software for each conversion type. For this purpose, i2Ont uses a combination of semantic technologies and natural language processing technology, which enable the system to learn from the user expertise and establish correspondences between a sample invoice and a conceptual invoice model. Based on such correspondences, i2Ont is able to import any subsequent invoice with a format compliant with the sample. i2Ont offers a generic and reusable platform for the automatic translation, in real time, of large volumes of electronic invoices in varying formats and models.

iSOCO estimates that the application of this technology on an industrial scale will allow organizations to save 30% of the total  electronic invoicing costs due to a reduction of the average manipulation time needed per electronic invoice. Furthermore, this technology will contribute to drastically reduce the need of ad-hoc translators between the different commercial invoice formats and systems, consequently increasing such savings. 

Gómez-Pérez emphasized that “our work in NeOn illustrates how semantic technologies can contribute to address some of the old interoperability problems in e-Business.” Jesus Contreras, Innovation Director at iSOCO added: “This is a great opportunity that iSOCO has been able to take advantage of, as we have undertaken a rigorous research and transformed technology into something potentially valuable in the market.  We will work on this prototype in order to make it commercially available as soon as possible”.