Roque O Bezerra

Maiara H Cancian
email: maiara.cancian@estacio.br

Ricardo J Rabelo
email: ricardo.rabelo@ufsc.br

Enhancing Network Collaboration in SOA Services Composition via Standard Business Processes Catalogues

Keywords: Business Process, Catalogue, Repository, SOA and UBL

Resources sharing between members are a key issue in Collaborative Networked Organizations (CNO). In the software services sector most of companies develops their services by their own and stores them at their local silos without sharing them with other partners. However, the development of services-based applications can be very complex and costly, which is a difficult issue to overcome as most of IT companies are SMEs. In this line this paper proposes a digital catalogue environment to leverage services sharing and larger reuse between CNO members. It is strongly grounded on standard business processes models that would be adopted by all the involved members. The catalogue acts as a collaborative environment that logically embraces all the public services made available by the CNO members, enabling software services developers to compose new services-based applications more agilely. A prototype has been implemented and its results are presented and discussed.

Introduction

Likewise in other sectors, SMEs (Small and Medium Sized Enterprises) from the software sector have been increasingly pushed to adopt advanced IT and more sustainable business models to stay competitive in the market [1,[START_REF] Kramer | The Role of the Information and Communications Technology Sector[END_REF]. However, they use to be very limited in their capacity to engage the required assets for that. Collaborative Networked Organizations (CNO) has emerged as a powerful strategy for SMEs to overcome such limitations [START_REF] Camarinha-Matos | A comprehensive modeling framework for collaborative networked organizations[END_REF].

In this sector, SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and services-based principles have been gradually adopted by software companies to more agilely create new solutions that are better aligned to their business strategy as well as to foster more advanced business models. Recent advances on IT have grounded the emergence of new models, e.g. the ones based on the vision of larger scale provision and offering of software services by pervasive providers from digital ecosystems, that are distributed over the Internet and that can be accessed on demand, from everywhere, anytime [START_REF] Cancian | Collaborative business processes for enhancing partnerships among software services providers[END_REF].

Working in a CNO can leverage many competitive advantages. For example, the sharing of resources [START_REF] Afsarmanesh | Methodologies, and Tools Supporting Establishment and Management of Second-Generation VBEs[END_REF], including software active assets [START_REF] Cancian | Collaborative business processes for enhancing partnerships among software services providers[END_REF]. Such collaboration dimension can help software services providers to save development costs, share losses and offer more value to customers [START_REF] Adner | A Sad Lesson in Collaborative Innovation[END_REF]. Empirical observations show that, however, such providers use to keep their (web-services-like software) deployed exclusively at their local silos to both support their own Business Processes (BP) and to attend their customers' process/systems needs [START_REF] Van Der Aalst | Business Process Management: A Comprehensive Survey[END_REF]. Operationally, this prevents providers from increasing the potential of services' reuse and ROI (Return of Investment) as services are not shared among companies. Strategically, this prevents them from the benefits of getting involved in larger value chains [START_REF] Cancian | Collaborative business processes for enhancing partnerships among software services providers[END_REF]. This limitation gets even bigger as providers and customers use to adopt their own and proprietary BP models [START_REF] Van Der Aalst | Business Process Management: A Comprehensive Survey[END_REF], which ends up requiring made-to-fit and hence more expensive IT solutions. This, in turn, use to create vendors dependency and technology lock-in [START_REF] Van Der Aalst | Business Process Management: A Comprehensive Survey[END_REF].

An approach to face this issue is via BP catalogues and repositories. Yan et al. [START_REF] Yan | Business Process Model Repositories -Framework and Survey[END_REF] have highlighted the importance of having catalogues to organize, manage and handling BPs repositories and their life cycle in an organization. Nurmilaakso [START_REF] Nurmilaakso | XML and e-business frameworks: a survey[END_REF] has pointed out the potential of a larger adoption of standard BPs by organizations in terms of processes interoperability and reuse. Actually, a number of BP models have been proposed since decades (e.g. ISO 19440, ISA-95, EDIFACT, ebXML, Rosettanet and UBL), although with an emphasis on interoperability and BP modeling [START_REF] Van Der Aalst | Business Process Management: A Comprehensive Survey[END_REF]. Many works also have been addressing BP management and BP:SOA layers integration to enhance business agility and IT alignment (e.g. [START_REF] Perin-Souza | A Dynamic Services Discovery Model for better leveraging BPM and SOA integration[END_REF]).

This paper investigates the hypothesis that such issues could be mitigated if CNO members adopt catalogues and repositories based on open and standard BP reference models to boost their collaboration so as to increase their competitiveness.

Applying the Design Science methodology [START_REF] Järvinen | Action Research is Similar to Design Science[END_REF], a standard-based BP digital catalogue environment was built to experimentally and mostly qualitatively verify the general feasibility of its use as an open and "unified" collaborative platform to create SOA/services-based applications. This artifact was used to create a scenario where reference BP models would be largely adopted by both software providers (when they develop their software services) and by their customers (when they specify their internal business processes). This would create a global logical view over all the software services (repositories) developed by the providers (and even by some customers) members of a CNO so that new SOA/services-based applications would be composed in a more agile and BP-coherent ways.

Although the model is flexible to deal with other BP models, UBL (Universal Business Language) [12], from OASIS, has been chosen for this proof of concepts regarding it is open, free and comprehensive.

This paper is organized as follows. Section 1 has introduced the problem and paper's goal. Section 2 summarizes the review of related works and identifies the scientific contribution of this research. These two sections represent the expression of awareness of the problem and the initial basis for the intended artifacts' design in the Design Science methodology. Section 3 describes the developed catalogue's rationale, its prototype and experimental results, representing the requirements, the artifact itself and the performance measurement steps in Design Science. Finally, section 4 presents some conclusions, representing the achieved results step.

Literature Review

As the result of a literature review it was identified that a number of authors have made important contributions on some of the issues pointed out in section 1. They have inspired this paper's authors in the design of the envisaged catalogue environment. For example, Cancian et al. [START_REF] Cancian | Collaborative business processes for enhancing partnerships among software services providers[END_REF] have identified the list of BPs that software service providers have to support in the collaboration life cycle (including services provision and support) considering aspects like partners' and services' certifications, governance and trustworthiness. Perin et al. [START_REF] Perin-Souza | A Dynamic Services Discovery Model for better leveraging BPM and SOA integration[END_REF] have developed a dynamic services discovery environment that works over disparate UDDI-based services repositories considering BPs' context and QoS to better support BPM-SOA integration. Using different IT supporting approaches, Camarinha-Matos et al. [START_REF] Camarinha-Matos | Collaborative Networks in Support of Service-Enhanced Product[END_REF] and Obidallah [START_REF] Obidallah | Service oriented virtual organizations: A service change management perspective[END_REF] have developed platforms to identify and to better link BPs' needs to partners' competences and software services within a CNO. Rabelo et al. [START_REF] Rabelo | The ECOLEAD Collaborative Business Infrastructure for Networked Organizations[END_REF] have developed an open and plug & play SOA/services-based ICT platform to support dynamic offering of software services by CNO members and their link to collaborative BPs, including the organization of services within a so-called federation. Pinheiro et al. [START_REF] Pinheiro | Experiments on Grid Computing for VE-related Applications[END_REF] have used a grid computing platform to support the sharing of computing resources (memory and storage) between CNO members.

Related to BP catalogues, it was observed that the existing ones are essentially repository management systems of proprietary BPs' models, including BP mining in some tools [START_REF] Yan | Business Process Model Repositories -Framework and Survey[END_REF]. Eighteen catalogues & repositories were found out in the search, but only six were considered as relevant and compared with the one being proposed in this work regarding the tackled scenario (Table 1). This comparison, however, does not aim at stating which one is the "best", or that the one developed is a full-fledged environment. Instead, it aims at highlighting the main differences and commonalities with the proposed BP catalogue when supporting that scenario.

The evaluated catalogues were: MIT Process Handbook [START_REF]The MIT Process Handbook Project[END_REF], Semantic Business Process Repository (SBPR) [START_REF] Ma | Semantic business process repository[END_REF], IBM BPEL Repository [START_REF] Vanhatalo | IBM BPEL Repository[END_REF], RepoX [START_REF] Song | an XML repository for workflow designs and specification[END_REF], Oryx [21] and APROMORE [START_REF] Rosa | APROMORE: An advanced process model repository[END_REF]. The requirements' subset used in Table 1 came from the surveys [START_REF] Van Der Aalst | Business Process Management: A Comprehensive Survey[END_REF][START_REF] Yan | Business Process Model Repositories -Framework and Survey[END_REF], and the 'CNO support' aspect was added by the authors as it was not covered by these two surveys. The classification yes does not mean the full support for the elicited requirements, but rather at least some basic support. About UBL, the Universal Business Language, it is a royalty-free library of standard XML business documents supporting commercial and logistical BPs for supply chains, such as procurement, purchasing, transport, logistics and intermodal freight management. UBL can act as a lingua-franca supporting disparate business applications and trading communities to exchange information using common format and terminology. It is modeled as XML schemas, which are modular, reusable and extensible, allowing its evolution and application to other domains [12].

Business Process Catalogue's Model & Prototype

The Catalogue's Rationale

The BP catalog has been conceived taking the requirements highlighted in the previous section into account, also considering the envisaged CNO scenario and current trends in BPM (Business Process Management) : SOA integration [START_REF] Van Der Aalst | Business Process Management: A Comprehensive Survey[END_REF][START_REF] Yan | Business Process Model Repositories -Framework and Survey[END_REF][START_REF] Fiammante | Dynamic SOA and BPM: Best Practices for Business Process Management and SOA Agility[END_REF]. This includes the use of open standards in all parts of the entire environment in order to mitigate interoperability problems.

The catalog is basically represented by an environment through which right actors from a CNO of software services providers can more agilely generate new software applications that are compliant to the respective BPs' UBL specifications when attending their customers. Customers would also adopt UBL. The applications themselves would be composed of a set of distributed software services.

Different services implementation models can co-exist. Equivalent services (from the functional point of view) can have different QoS levels, support different technologies-(e.g. web services, SOAP, etc.), billing-and access-models, multitenancy, etc., depending on each provider's strategy and its internal development skills and practices. However, such equivalent services should adopt a common service's interface (i.e. the same parameters for the service's WSDL, in this case). Once published, they will act as the services' references for further discovery, binding and invocation. There can be multiple equivalent services being provided by a sort of different providers for the same BP.

Providers are autonomous to decide which services will be shared within the federation also respecting contracted businesses and SLAs. The general management of such providers, their services' governance, reputation, revenues distribution, CNO's conventions, etc., as covered in [START_REF] Cancian | Collaborative business processes for enhancing partnerships among software services providers[END_REF], are subjects out of the scope of this work.

The to-be generated SOA/services-based application can be very complex in terms of e.g. interoperation, security and resilience capabilities. Besides that, services can be of different types, such as related to business, shop-floor, utilities, infrastructure, etc. A composed application via the catalog environment will rarely be ready to be deployed and executed. Actually a number of technical adjustments of many natures usually have to be made in real cases, besides the fact the, depending on the planned deployment and access models, non-software services can be required (e.g. manual integrations at the customers' site, configuration of the eventual ESB in use, adjustments in the generated BPEL file due to BPMN limitations, helpdesk, etc.) [START_REF] Rabelo | Towards the Next Generation Service Oriented Enterprise Architecture[END_REF].

A given SOA/services-based application can vary from customer to customer for the same BP depending on the required non-functional requirements, both at global level (e.g. end-to-end QoS) and at individual services level (e.g. when a given system's functionality should respect specific performance metrics). For example, an application to cope with the UBL Invoicing BP for some customer can be composed of a different number of services (and their versions and respective providers) than one for the same BP to attend other costumer's requirements.

The Catalogue's Architecture and Prototype

The catalogue's architecture can be seen as a partial instantiation of the BPM reference architecture proposed in [START_REF] Van Der Aalst | Business Process Management: A Comprehensive Survey[END_REF]. It provides some support to design processes, handle applications' repository and manage related services enactment [START_REF] Van Der Aalst | Business Process Management: A Comprehensive Survey[END_REF].

The catalogue itself is a SOA application, being its modules implemented as services too. It is integrated to a BP editor (at the BPM level) and to a dynamic service discovery environment (at the SOA level), besides interacting with other modules. This global environment helps managers to design, reuse or modify existing services-based applications (developed following UBL), to discover and bind services from the CNO federation, to store the composed application, and to execute it when necessary. Figure 1 provides a general view of the catalogue environment's architecture. In general, the IT architect and/or the Process analyst from a given CNO starts interacting with the BPM editor looking for the (UBL) BP for which they want: to create a new (services-based) software application; to modify a previous one (to reuse it) already developed for e.g. an older BP's version; or to bind another services to the application regarding new QoS requirements. The catalog provides the usual functionalities for this, as edit, search, delete, merge, compose, monitor, save, among others. Users also specify the QoS for the application (out of 11 parameters, such as performance and response time), being further transformed into a SLA.

Figure 2 shows a case where the Ordering UBL process would be accessed from the BP catalogue aiming at generating a respective application. An auxiliary graphical interface allows assigning the required QoS. In the case this application had been already generated in the past (it would be stored in the catalogue BPEL's repository) and it can be recovered for further refinements. Processes are modeled in BPMN and are further converted into BPEL files. Figure 3 shows an excerpt of the generated BPEL file. The UBL repository can work over a single CNO member's services repository or the so-called CNO federation, which creates a "cloud-like" view over the distributed providers' repositories. The catalogue is a web-based application and uses an Internet browser as its front-end. The catalogue environment acts as a 'unified' platform through which the collaboration among consumers and providers is leveraged and supported. Depending on the agreed deployment model, each member can have access to the federation and catalogues via such front-end.

One of the key elements of the catalogue environment is the discovery service [START_REF] Perin-Souza | A Dynamic Services Discovery Model for better leveraging BPM and SOA integration[END_REF], developed in the scope of this work. It supports the search, analysis, selection and final binding of the services (from the services federation) that fit best the set of functional and non-functional requirements of the application(s) under construction. The discovery service permanently checks in background the services' properties and availabilities, and maintains a ranking of up to five services for each BP's sub processes so as to always have a service ready to be invoked. This means that services binding are done dynamically instead of statically.

In the case none service can be discovered to match a given BP's requirement then the IT architect and/or Process analyst can or should relax some QoS constraint. In the worst case, if the situation persists then a new service should be developed.

As the BPEL execution is not triggered as soon as services are discovered, the involved actors can check the suggested (five) services for each BP's sub process and manually modify the ranking. This ranking is based on the QoS fitness range. Once everything is set up for the given BP then the respective BPEL file is stored into the BPEL catalogue repository for further execution.

Although the management of the federation is a subject out of the scope of this work, new services and repositories can be added or deleted from the environment. This dynamics is automatically handled by the discovery service as it always checks the registered services and available repositories.

Services and their interfaces should be previously and properly registered (following the SOA principles and the UBL specifications). Figure 4 shows a fragment of the code used to register a service related to the OrderingProcess UBL process, which has an activity called placeOrder that is performed by the BuyerParty actor. This is modeled in a UDDI information structure (metadata) devoted for that, called tModel:uddi:ubl:services:ordering_orderingprocess_buyerparty_placeorder. Every information (e.g., QoS attributes in this case) related to a given service has a tModel, and the UDDI supporting software has 'services' to access them. A generic getServiceQoS() method was implemented to get the desired tModels. In this example, the service's address (endpoint) is http://examplecompany.com/services/ubl/ orderingprocess/buyerParty/placeOrder.

Fig. 4. Service registry in the UDDI

The Catalogue's Implementation Technologies and Deployment Environment

The catalogue was fully implemented in Java, using the Eclipse platform. The BPM editor has used the IBM Websphere Business Modeler tool and a plug-in was developed as a connector to support the implementation of the UBL specification. Process models are generated in BPMN. The whole SOA environment has adopted the SCA architecture (Service Component Architecture) and was executed in the Apache Tuscany environment. The execution environment was supported by the Intalio BPMS, a suite that generates and uses BPEL (version 2.0 compliant), using the Apache ODE. Hibernate/HSQLDB was the database used to store the UBL BP models. Services are registered and stored using jUDDI, compliant with UDDI 3.0. The services used to test the catalogue were implemented using the Apache CXF framework. Only web services, WSDL and SOAP were supported.

Five servers were used to simulate the scenario of largely distributed repositories and CNO members. A set of 50 services was implemented in a very thin way, emulating the different activities of the several UBL processes. One hundred instances of these services were automatically generated, only and randomly varying the 11 possible QoS attributes so as to simulate the natural different services' "quality" of the CNO's providers. This total of 5000 services was equally deployed in 5 servers and also randomly registered in 5 repositories, deployed in a local network.

BPs that had some human intervention in their execution were implemented in way to provide a simple graphical interface for users to type what was required. This was inspired in the BPEL4People standard [12].

Catalogue Evaluation

A set of formal unit and integration tests were performed to verify the correctness of the catalogue against its requirements, especially the ones listed in Table 1.

After a sort of experiments based on many samples of UBL-based BPs modeled in the BPM environment, the systems run smoothly, supporting all the planned functionalities. In more particular, it allowed the generation and execution of new SOA/services-based applications (or changes in previously stored ones) as a result of compositions of (reused) services coming from the diverse CNO members. The intense use of open standards at all the involved levels has strongly mitigated interoperability problems and hence has facilitated the whole implementation. In other words, it was technically feasible to support compositions via the sharing of assets from the CNO members.

Considering that the developed prototype is a proof of concepts instrument handling a relatively advanced scenario, it was not feasible to test the catalogue close to a real CNO of services providers. Therefore, a more qualitative analysis had also to be done, using the expert panel technique [START_REF] Zelkowitz | Experimental models for validating technology[END_REF] for that.

Nine experts on BPM and SOA were carefully selected via their curricula and previous experience on these areas for a general evaluation of the catalogue. Six experts were from the academia and the other three from IT companies, being two private and one public ones. After explaining and presenting the catalogue, they answered a questionnaire with seven questions, adopting the Likert scale (from totally agree to totally disagree). Some questions had a number of sub questions.

In summary, all of them agreed that: a catalogue like this can mitigate business and IT alignment problems; the catalogue is reasonably easy and intuitive to use in all of its main actions, which is suitable for SME managers; the catalogue isolates many technical details from the users when composing and generating applications; the catalogue can help companies to generate new applications in a faster and lower cost way thanks to the intense reuse. On the other hand, the interviewees expressed some concerns. In general, they were mostly related to the organizational and cultural obstacles to adopt a solution like that, both at SMEs and CNO levels. Actually, in essence, most of the identified obstacles are essentially the same than the ones pointed out in the deployment and operation of a general CNO, as depicted in [START_REF] Romero | Collaborative Networks as Modern Industrial Organizations: Real Case Studies[END_REF].

Conclusions

This paper has presented a digital business process and software services catalogue environment as a contribution and approach to boost collaboration between CNO members of IT providers when the development of SOA/services-based applications.

Based on the research and experiments that have been carried out it was concluded that: i) an open digital catalogue environment has the potential to work as a "unified" collaborative platform for creating services-based applications within a CNO; and ii) it is technologically feasible to be built using open standards. It was also realized that the ultimate goal of a composition via the catalogue is not necessarily the development of an application for a very final concrete customer. The catalogue can also be used as a basis for: i) idealizing future applications or even acting as a supporting platform for collaborative innovation in software services, as in [START_REF] Santanna-Filho | A Flexible Collaborative Innovation Model for SOA Services Providers[END_REF]; and ii) identifying gaps inside the CNO, which in turn can demand new services developments and can trigger other collaborations and joint results' exploitations.

The scenario created by the catalogue environment ends up representing a win-win underlying business model that tries to take advantage of the increasing pervasiveness of providers and services. For clients, this allows to flexibly find alternative services (instead of developing them) and to bind them to their BPs considering the needed functional and non-functional requirements. For providers, their software services can be more easily discovered and more intensively used, maximizing their sustainability.

Although the model was evaluated using the UBL process model, the catalogue's architecture is open to cope with other process models. In the same line, providers can offer new or equivalent services for different process modelseven simultaneously via e.g. multi-tenant services architectureand hence for other customers.

A number of assumptions were made to evaluate this work. The main one is that CNO partners have to adopt a common business process reference model when modeling their BPs and develop related software services. On the other hand, the adoption of conventions and models for BPs and software's interfaces by companies and their partners is a common practice since decades. IT systems have been more and more developed using open standards to reduce interoperability problems and development costs as well as to maximize software reuse and ROI. Regarding this, it is believed that providers will be increasingly interested to develop their services following reference process models.

Next main steps of this research refer to implement an ontology for helping providers to map their services' interfaces regarding UBL's semantics, and to develop a resilience module to support the proper execution of the generated applications.

Fig. 1 .

 1 Fig. 1. Catalogue environment's general architecture.

Fig. 2 .

 2 Fig. 2. Loading a given UBL process and QoS constraints.

Fig. 3 .

 3 Fig. 3. Generated BPEL file.

Table 1 .

 1 Basic comparison among BP catalogues BP catalog as a "common platform" to be used at CNO level enabling members to compose SOA/services-based software applications by means of massive reuse from a large-scale pool of shared services adopting open reference BP models.

	Requirements	Process Handbook	SBPR	IBM BPEL	RepoX Oryx	APRO-MORE	Proposed Model
	Reusable BPs	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	BP Language Independence	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Flexibility for BPs
	extensions


Mohamed Adel Rezk
email: mohamed.adel@insight-centre.org

Mahmoud H Aliyu
email: mahmoud.aliyu@insight-centre.org

Hatem Bensta
email: hatem.bensta@insight-centre.org

Adegboyega Ojo
email: adegboyega.ojo@insight-centre.org

Standardising Public Policy Documentation to Foster Collaboration across Government Agencies

Keywords: Core Public Policy Vocabulary, CPPV, Inter-agency collaboration, Standardisation, Open Policy, Policy Repository, e-Government

Public policies documents convey strategic directions and framework of actions of government in a particular sector. For most societal challenges, there is a need for government entities at the same and different levels to coordinate their policies and collaborate on the implementations of policies. However, this coordination and collaboration efforts are seriously hampered by the lack of a central repository for public policy documents from which policy makers and researchers can access related policies on a particular topic, industry or group of stakeholders. To address this challenge, this paper describes the development of Vocabulary to underpin the implementation of a shared public policy repository in Europe. The Core Public Policy Vocabulary (CPPV) is developed as a semantic interoperability resource for government organizations for consistent description and documentation of public policies to enable efficient discovery, cross-referencing and analysis of policy documents. We describe our approach, conceptual model, elements of the vocabulary, its implementation and concrete scenarios for the use of the vocabulary.

Introduction

Service Delivery and Policy Networks are one of the most common Governance Networks in the public sector in which entities within government and outside government work together to tackle complex societal challenges [START_REF] Ojo | Deploying governance networks for societal challenges[END_REF]. Collaboration in public policy making is pivotal to coherence of government programs in general. Policy coherence entails systematic promotion of mutually reinforcing policy actions across government departments and agencies creating synergies towards achieving the agreed objectives [START_REF]OECD: Policy coherence for development[END_REF]. In the context of Sustainable Development, integrated policy making and coherence aims to foster synergies across economic, social and environmental policy areas; identifying trade-offs and reconcile domestic and international objectives; and addressing the spill-overs of domestic policies on other countries and on future generations (ibid).

There are three main approaches towards assessing the coherence of public policies. These include: 1) Analytical approaches: Modelling of cause-and-effect relations; 2) Participatory approaches: Involving stakeholders; and 3) Knowledge management: collection and processing of data 1 . The knowledge management dimension requires some form of standardization in collecting the relevant data on policies to be stored in the knowledge base. Standardisation here entails specifying some minimum agreed information to be provided by different parties (i.e. government agencies) responsible for producing and publishing public policies. For instance, the European Commission's Interoperability Solutions for Public Administrations (ISA) provides a number of similar standards -Core vocabularies about organizations, person, public services, locations, public organizations etc.; to facilitate semantic interoperability among public administrations across the European Union [START_REF]ISA: Core Vocabularies Specification[END_REF]. These vocabularies are data models which capture the fundamental characteristic of an entity in a context-neutral fashion thus enabling public administration to use these models as basis for information exchange, data integration and publishing of open data or information 2 .

The development of the vocabulary -Core Public Policy Vocabulary (CPPV) presented in this article was motivated by the lack of a public repository or knowledge base of open public policies and the unavailability of existing standards in the form of ontologies, schema or data models that could be adapted to underpin the development of such repository. To address this problem, we have developed a conceptual model and a vocabulary to implement the model as a basis for a public policy repository or knowledge base.

This rest of the paper is structured as follows: Sections 2 describes some of the basic concepts underpinning CPPV vocabulary. The methodology employed for the development of the vocabulary is presented in Section 3 while the details of the vocabulary are provided in Section 4. Section 5 discusses the application scenario of the vocabulary followed by some final discussions in Section 6.

Concepts

This section briefly explains some core concepts underpinning the CPPV vocabulary. It describes the concept of public policies in Section 2.1 and the notion of vocabularies and ontologies in Section 2.2.

Public Policies

A Public Policy is a commitment made by a government (or inter-governmental) entity to accomplish a single or set of objectives. It could also be described as "a principled guide to action taken by the administrative executive branches of the state 1 http://www.liaise-kit.eu/ia-method/methods-analyse-coherence-policies 2 https://ec.europa.eu/isa2/solutions/core-vocabularies_en with regard to a class of issues in a manner consistent with law and institutional customs" 3 . A policy might be detailed using laws or other formal documents to discuss the institutional settings e.g. executing organization, and rewards/fines system [START_REF]CDM -Executive Board: Definitions of policy and programme of activities[END_REF]. A Public policy is could also as the aggregation of actions, legal acts, governing measures, duties, sequences of operations and resource allocation precedence that are completed, in the 'public's' name [START_REF] Siobhan | Community Development Development[END_REF].

Examples of policies include regulatory policies, redistributive policies, fiscal policies and monetary policies [START_REF] Cochran | Public Policy:Perspectives and Choices[END_REF]. Regulatory policies allow the government to exert control over the conduct of certain activities. The most obvious examples of regulation techniques include civil and criminal penalties for certain behaviors. Redistributive policies are used for managing the economy as a whole. The techniques of control involve fiscal (tax) and monetary (supply of money policies. Fiscal techniques employ tax rates and government spending to affect total or aggregate demand. Each particular approach to taxing or spending can have a different impact on the overall economy, so political entrepreneurs often propose or initiate policies with the goal of achieving specific impacts. Monetary policies attempt to regulate the economy by changing the rate of growth of the money supply or manipulating interest rates.

Public policies documents are usually published on government agencies websites responsible for their development and implementation. In exceptional cases (e.g. the UK government 4 ), policy documents are accessible through one central point. Even when this is the case, cross-analysis and linking of these policies is not possible. .

Vocabularies & Public Policies

Vocabularies are represents the definitions of concepts and their relationships in a certain domain of interest. Practically, vocabularies represent the base component for the semantic web inferencing framework [START_REF]W3: Ontologies -W3C[END_REF]. Vocabularies also enable semantic integration and interoperation and understanding of the domain [START_REF] Valente | Types and roles of legal ontologies[END_REF]. Ontologies are more complex form of vocabularies which are described formal explicit specification of a shared conceptualization [START_REF] Gruber | A translation approach to portable ontology specifications[END_REF]. Ontologies are employed to perform following: organizing and structuring information, reasoning and problem solving, semantic indexing and search, semantic integration and interoperation and understanding of the domain [START_REF] Valente | Types and roles of legal ontologies[END_REF]. Ontologies like vocabularies do not only describe the data model, it also supports the specification of concrete exemplars (also called individuals) of such models.

There have been past efforts in describing public policies using other methods of formalism associated with the subject of policy modelling. For instance in the OCOPOMO (Open Collaboration Policy Modelling) project, the goal was to engage stakeholders in policy making [START_REF] Wimmer | Open Collaboration in Policy Development: Concept and Architecture to integrate scenario development and formal policy modelling[END_REF]. Public policies such as renewable energy policy of the Kosice region in Slovakia, housing policy of the city of London or the distribution of structural funds in the Campania region in Italy were analysed and modelled. OCOPOMO provided so-called Consistent Conceptual Description for these policy cases. The OCOPOMO framework also supported semi-automatic transformation of conceptual policy descriptions in the CCD into formal policy models. In a second example the Open Preservation Data project [START_REF] Kulovits | Open Preservation Data : Controlled vocabularies and ontologies for preservation ecosystems[END_REF], designed a policy vocabulary to control the digital preservation process and as enabling preservation systems to collaborate more effectively. Thirdly, some standardization efforts in the United States on publishing strategy related documents and performance plans of government agencies have produced the Strategy Markup Language (StratML) [START_REF]Strategy Markup Language Committee: stratml[END_REF]. StratML was designed to enable the publishing of these documents in open and machine readable format.

However, so far, none of these efforts have resulted in a scalable public policy standard that could be adopted to underpin (pan European) Public Policy repository.

Methodology

This section describes our overall approach in the development of the Core Public Policy Vocabulary. There are popular alternatives to developing vocabularies. The first is to adopt a lightweight version of ontology development approaches. The second approach is to adopt the more general conceptual modelling process. We adopted the latter approach due to the importance we gave the underpinning conceptual model for the vocabulary.

Conceptual modelling (CM) is the elicitation and the representation of the general knowledge that an information system operating in a specific domain needs to know [START_REF] Olivé | A research agenda for conceptual schema-centric development[END_REF][START_REF] Rolland | Capturing system intentionality with maps[END_REF]. In particular, conceptual modelling aims at representing static (e.g., objects, entities) and dynamic phenomena (e.g., events and processes) in a particular domain [START_REF] Wand | Research commentary: information systems and conceptual modeling a research agenda[END_REF]. Conceptual modelling encompasses four elements [START_REF] Wand | Research commentary: information systems and conceptual modeling a research agenda[END_REF]:

CM grammar [START_REF] Wand | Theoretical foundations for conceptual modelling in information systems development[END_REF] (or CM notation [START_REF] Mylopoulos | From object-oriented to goal-oriented requirements analysis[END_REF]) that provides a set of constructs and rules showing how to combine the constructs in order to model the real world domain [START_REF] Wand | Research commentary: information systems and conceptual modeling a research agenda[END_REF]. The IS literature includes a vast variety of conceptual modelling grammars including data oriented, process oriented and object-oriented ones, [START_REF] Olivé | A research agenda for conceptual schema-centric development[END_REF][START_REF] Wand | Research commentary: information systems and conceptual modeling a research agenda[END_REF][START_REF] Mylopoulos | From object-oriented to goal-oriented requirements analysis[END_REF][START_REF] Rolland | Information Systems and Web Information Systems: A Methodological Perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Olle | Information Systems Methodologies; A Framework for Understanding[END_REF][START_REF] Rolland | From conceptual modelling to requirements engineering[END_REF].

CM method (or modelling technique [START_REF] Mylopoulos | From object-oriented to goal-oriented requirements analysis[END_REF][START_REF] Davies | How do practitioners use conceptual modeling in practice?[END_REF] that prescribes how to map the real phenomena of the domain into a model of the domain [START_REF] Wand | Research commentary: information systems and conceptual modeling a research agenda[END_REF]. A rather limited number of CM methods exist in the literature [START_REF] Wand | Research commentary: information systems and conceptual modeling a research agenda[END_REF][START_REF] Rolland | Information Systems and Web Information Systems: A Methodological Perspective[END_REF].

CM script (or conceptual schema [START_REF] Olivé | A research agenda for conceptual schema-centric development[END_REF][START_REF] Rolland | Capturing system intentionality with maps[END_REF][START_REF] Mylopoulos | From object-oriented to goal-oriented requirements analysis[END_REF][START_REF] Rolland | Information Systems and Web Information Systems: A Methodological Perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Bubenko | From information algebra to enterprise modelling and ontologies A historical perspective on modelling for information systems[END_REF] or conceptual model [START_REF] Mylopoulos | From object-oriented to goal-oriented requirements analysis[END_REF][START_REF] Rolland | Information Systems and Web Information Systems: A Methodological Perspective[END_REF] is the output of the CM method and is constructed using a CM grammar [START_REF] Wand | Research commentary: information systems and conceptual modeling a research agenda[END_REF]. It is usually one (or more) diagrams [START_REF] Rolland | Information Systems and Web Information Systems: A Methodological Perspective[END_REF] depicting the domain's concepts. A great variety of conceptual scripts have been proposed in the literature [START_REF] Olivé | A research agenda for conceptual schema-centric development[END_REF][START_REF] Wand | Research commentary: information systems and conceptual modeling a research agenda[END_REF][START_REF] Rolland | Information Systems and Web Information Systems: A Methodological Perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Davies | How do practitioners use conceptual modeling in practice?[END_REF][START_REF] Frisse | The financial impact of health information exchange on emergency department care[END_REF].

CM context, which is the setting in which conceptual modelling occurs and scripts are used.

Guide by the above Conceptual modelling framework, we started by developing concrete scenarios and general use cases for the vocabulary. Following this we analysed over 20 well documented public policy documents across different sectors and from different public administration cultures in Europe. These documents serve as primary sources of requirements for what could constitute core elements in describing the public policies (as shown in Fig. 1).

A minimalist orientation was adopted in identifying these core elements in line with the guiding principles for the European Commission's Core Vocabulary5 as agreements are easier when the standards are simple enough to enable exchange and concomitantly allow for possible extensions by individual collaborating government entities using the standards. This section provides some details about the elements of the CPPV vocabulary. Section 4.1 describes the conceptual model while

Conceptual Model

The Core Public Policy Vocabulary (CPPV) contains the following classes and properties to model elements public policies resulting from the process described above. Elements were included in the vocabulary after detailed analysis of their necessity in being part of the core or minimal set. Subsequently, the Core Public Policy Ontology was manually populated (CPP-owl)6 by extracting and mapping information from sample public policies as shown in Fig. 5. A detailed description of the CPPV elements is listed in tables 1 (the main classes) and 2 (properties). The definitions of these elements are provided in respective tables. Policy coordination and coherence can be analysed and effected through a number of relationships such as impacts which specified which sectors are impacted by a policy, implements which indicates which programmes are linked to specific policies or governs which specifies a legislation or higher level framework that binds a set of policies. All these properties with a supporting Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) strategy provide strong mechanism for linking in a policy ecosystem.

Vocabulary Implementation

The above vocabulary was implemented in number of ways. First, we created an ontology based on this vocabulary in Protégé (one of the most popular open source ontology editor and management tool) so that basic analysis and reasoning could be performed on exemplar policies. By capturing the policies in Protégé, a linked data of public policy could be generated and published as open data on the government open data portals. Figure 3 below the screen shot of the implementation, In our second implementation, the vocabulary was on the employed for publishing our sample policies as open policies on the popular Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) 7 platform developed by the Open Foundation. CKAN is the most popular open data platform available. CKAN in our instance represents an open policy repository providing one central point of access to the public and policy makers. In addition to the vocabulary, the use of standard code lists and entity identifiers are required to fully link up the published policies.

Applications

This section describes in more details how the vocabulary could be exploited to enable collaboration among government entities in the implementation of public policies. Following this, we present a few other application scenarios of the CPPV vocabulary and discuss how it could be formally adopted.

The Collaboration Scenario

Let's assume the availability of the above CKAN based Open Policy Repository in a Public Administration jurisdiction. In addition, we could assume that all public authorities are mandated to publish the policies on the Open Policy Platform. Supposing the Environment department would like to design a policy to address the increasing level of air pollution in a city produced by cars. One of the policy makers in the Environment searches for "air pollution" on the policy repository to identifier other policies that may be addressing issues related to air pollution. He discovers that the Trade and Transport ministries are two other departments interested on the issue. The reference from the Trade department referred to levels of emissions permitted from imported cars and the Transport department reference was linked to the road worthiness assessment. The policy officer from the environment investigates the programmes associated with respective policies and sets up meetings to better understand how the new policy to be design could leverage the existing programs. The officer also wishes to know how the environment department could participate in pollution related programs of these other departments.

Other Application Scenarios

Here we highlight two other application scenarios for the CPPV vocabulary. Scenario 2: Semantic Policy Search Engine: Researchers and Business users of a CPPV ontology based search engine to browse the public policies or run complex queries, to discover opportunities in a market. Example: Firm X is specialized in the energy sector; they would like to extend their business to Country Y. To get a better understanding of the market they need to review Country Y's energy policies and related policies using a search engine such as the semantic policy search engine.

Scenario 3: "Policy learning" -During the policy making or policy update processes, governments may review policies from the Open Public Policy platform to find best practices or certain policy aspects to adopt. Example: Government Y is developing a new Health policy and would want to review different Health polices implemented in the European Union, query for certain aspects of the Health policies to improve their policy decisions.

Formal Adoption of the Core Public Policy Vocabulary

Finally, we briefly highlight the vision for the adoption of the vocabulary. Currently, the vocabulary is being reviewed by experts involved in public sector information modelling practices in Ireland, Scotland and UK, semantic interoperability and standards in Europe for staged adoption. After the adoption by a these governments, the follow-up steps entails submitting the vocabulary to the European Commission's ISA programme as a candidate Core Vocabulary.

Conclusion

Our work was motivated the lack of the of central repository for government policies in Europe and the underpinning semantic data model or vocabulary to facilitate the inter-linking and exchange of public policies in the European Public Administration Ecosystem. The unavailability of such infrastructure makes the collaboration among public agencies and development of coherent public policies difficult. In addressing this challenge, we have developed a public policy ontology guided by the principles driving the ISA's Core Vocabulary initiatives. Our Core Public Policy Vocabulary complements existing core vocabularies and reuses elements of these vocabularies.

Fig. 1 .

 1 Fig. 1. The Core Public Policy Vocabulary Modeling Methodology

Fig. 2

 2 Fig. 2 Core Public Policy Vocabulary (CPPV) Conceptual Model

Fig. 3

 3 Fig. 3 Core Public Policy Vocabulary Implementations in Protégé and CKAN

Table 1 .

 1 CPPV Classes i.e. Concepts

	Class	Description				URI
	cppv:GuidingFramework	The Parent Class for the Guiding Principle
		and the Regulation.
							http://www.ego
							v.deri.ie/cppv.o
							wl#GuidingPri
							nciple
	cwr:institutional_structure	Explicit and implicit institutional rules and	http://www.fao
		policies designed to provide a structure	.org/aims/aos/c
		where	various	work	roles	and	wr.owl#institut
		responsibilities	are	delegated	and	ional_structure
		coordinated. source:(cwr)
	objectives-ont:Objectives	Things policy actions set out or are	http://www.da
		intended to attain or accomplish. Top level	ml.org/experim
		class for Goals and Objectives.	ent/ontology/o
		source:(objectives-ont)			bjectives-ont#
							Objectives

http://www.ego v.deri.ie/cppv.o wl#GuidingFra mework cppv:GuidingPrinciple

The foundation of every organization.

They define what is truly important for its success.

Table 2 .

 2 CPPV Object Properties i.e. Relations

	Object Property	Domain	Range	Is inverse of
	belongsTo	Vision	Policy	hasVision
	compose	Stakeholder	institutional_structure	composedOf
	constructs	Vision	Objective	constructedBy
	documents	PolicyDocument	Policy	documentedby
	executes	institutional_structure	Programme	executedBy
	governs	GuidingFramework	Policy	governedBy
	impacts	Policy	Sector	isImpactedBy
	implements	Programme	Policy	implementedBy
	influences	Policy	Stakeholder	influencedBy
	organizes	Plan	Programme	organizedBy
	oversees	OversightEntity	Policy	overseenBy
	relatedTo	Thing	Thing	relatedTo

https://www.jstor.org/topic/public-policy/

https://www.gov.uk/government/policies

https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/site/core_vocabularies/Core_Vocabularies_user_handbook/ISA%2 0Hanbook%20for%20using%20Core%20Vocabularies.pdf

http://vmogi01.deri.ie/egovcppv/

https://ckan.org/this

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page

We are currently in the second stage of the third-party country expert review process of the vocabulary. We intend to develop many uses cases to demonstrate policy collaboration opportunities afforded by the CPPV. In addition, we plan to provide reference implementation using other technologies such as Semantic Media Wiki or Wiki Data 8 . In the near future, we intend to propose the CPPV vocab as a candidate ISA Core Vocabulary.


Laura Macchion
email: laura.macchion@unipd.it

Andrea Furlan
email: andrea.furlan@unipd.it

Andrea Vinelli
email: andrea.vinelli@unipd.it

The Implementation of Traceability in Fashion Networks

Keywords: Fashion, traceability, collaborative networks, supply network configuration, supply chain

A complete network traceability to identify suppliers and customers' activities and share information along the entire network is not an easy objective to achieve. It requires the involvement of all the network stages: manufacturing, purchasing and distribution processes. This research aims to study traceability for collaborative network within the fashion industry. We conducted an in-depth case study using an interview protocol specifically designed for this research investigating drivers as well as practices for network traceability.

Traceability and the Collaborative Network Context

Traceability is the ability to trace the history, use and location of a particular entity through the implementation of identification systems (ISO 8402:1994). The ISO 9001:2000 extends this definition to networks' traceability, referring to the ability to trace the history, the use and the location of products and processes along the entire network. This way traceability is related to the origin of raw materials and the history of all processes interesting final products within the network [START_REF] Karlsen | Literature review: Does a common theoretical framework to implement food traceability exist?[END_REF]. It involves all purchasing, production and distribution stages, in which processes and product units are appropriately identified by a collaborative exchange of information along the network [START_REF] Bechini | Patterns and technologies for enabling supply chain traceability through collaborative e-business[END_REF] [START_REF] Hu | Modeling and implementation of the vegetable supply chain traceability system[END_REF]. Two distinct aspects compose traceability: tracing (i.e. the ability to determine the origin and characteristics of a particular product within the network) and tracking (i.e. the ability to follow the path of a product along the network from suppliers to consumers) [START_REF] Karlsen | Literature review: Does a common theoretical framework to implement food traceability exist?[END_REF] [START_REF] Bechini | Patterns and technologies for enabling supply chain traceability through collaborative e-business[END_REF]. Moreover, two different levels of traceability can be identified. The first is related to company's internal traceability, which is the ability to track and trace the products' batch within firm's boundaries [START_REF] Bechini | Patterns and technologies for enabling supply chain traceability through collaborative e-business[END_REF]. The second is linked to a broader traceability concept that involves the entire network: network traceability represents the ability to track and trace products' batches along sourcing, production and distribution activities, starting from the raw material till final sale [START_REF] Karlsen | Literature review: Does a common theoretical framework to implement food traceability exist?[END_REF].

In literature studies mainly focus on agri-food network traceability systems [START_REF] Regattieri | Traceability of food products: General frame work and experimental evidence[END_REF] [START_REF] Bendaoud | A Methodological Framework to Design and Assess Food Traceability Systems[END_REF] [1] [START_REF] Bosona | Food traceability as an integral part of logistics management in food and agricultural supply chain[END_REF], with a particular attention on perishable goods chains such as meat [START_REF] Smith | Post-slaughter traceability[END_REF], grain [START_REF] Thakur | Framework for implementing traceability system in the bulk grain supply chain[END_REF], fish, fruit [START_REF] Canavari | Traceability as part of competitive strategy in the fruit supply chain[END_REF] and vegetables [START_REF] Hu | Modeling and implementation of the vegetable supply chain traceability system[END_REF]. However, nowadays, other important sectors such as pharmaceutics are interested in network traceability. Because of the internationalization phenomena that make global networks very difficult to be controlled, also in the fashion industry there is a growing attention to traceability systems to better identify network partners and, in some cases, to protect country of origin strategies. The fashion industry plays a relevant role in the European economy: in 2015 EU fashion industry sales equalled approximately €169 billion, with 174,000 companies [11] and in particular the Italian fashion industry reached €52.4 billion with exports representing about the 56% of the revenue [START_REF]Sistema Moda Italia[END_REF].

In recent years some fashion groups have approached the network traceability issue, by focusing specially on the procurement of raw materials. For instance, Patagonia, a manufacture of outdoor clothing, has launched a specific initiative, which allows customers to verify the origin of raw materials used for their products. Despite the growing importance of the network traceability issue for fashion companies, there are no legislations, mandatory requirements or standards identifying the proper method to design a traceability system for collaborative networks. Therefore, companies that decide to implement traceability, face the challenge of creating ad hoc practices. Even the academic literature on fashion traceability appears to be fragmented and limited to some parts of the network. The few contributions available in literature mainly focus on the internal traceability of companies, instead of adopting a network perspective [START_REF] Bottani | Economical assessment of the impact of RFID technology and EPC system on the fast-moving consumer goods supply chain[END_REF] and the alignment with the entire networks, in which many and heterogeneous actors operate, is still a missing point [START_REF] Macchion | Redefining supply network strategies to face changing environments. A study from the fashion and luxury industry[END_REF].

The achievement of network traceability within the fashion industry needs to be supported by appropriate studies, encompassing the entire network activities to provide relevant value for both companies operating in the collaborative network and customers. This research aims to offer a first contribution in this perspective analysis both drivers and practices in the field of network traceability.

Drivers for Network Traceability

Achieving network traceability seems to be a current issue for many industries. For instance, because of the scandals occurred in the '90s such as the BSE contamination (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy), in the agri-food industry strict network traceability legislation has been introduced to reduce risks for consumer health and minimize costs related to the withdrawal from the market of contaminated batches. Therefore for this industry the traceability of the network is already a legal obligation within the European Union, as well as in other countries such as the United States and Japan, attracting considerable attention of both researchers and practitioners to store real time information along the chain. Such studies have led to the identification of proper techniques to trace final products, and their raw materials, ascertain contamination problems and prevent them [START_REF] Bechini | Patterns and technologies for enabling supply chain traceability through collaborative e-business[END_REF]. Full compliance with existing legislation is therefore the most important driver for agri-food companies to implement network traceability [START_REF] Donnelly | The importance of transformations for traceability. -A case study of lamb and lamb products[END_REF]. Nevertheless, other motivations for network traceability exist besides legal and public safety. First, in the fashion industry the development of global networks has increased the attention for sustainability aspects that could be well guaranteed through the implementation of traceability systems [START_REF] Karlsen | Literature review: Does a common theoretical framework to implement food traceability exist?[END_REF] [9] [START_REF] Fornasiero | Proposing an integrated LCA-SCM model to evaluate the sustainability of customisation strategies[END_REF].

On one hand, production processes that employ chemical components and scarce natural resources, resulting in heavy environmental impacts, characterize the fashion sector. On the other hand, fashion networks are truly planetary, characterized by companies producing and distributing at world-level with different working conditions and Country legislations [START_REF] Macchion | Supply chain configurations: a model to evaluate performance in customised productions[END_REF]. Therefore, these aspects encourage the implementation of network traceability to ensure customers the sustainability (both environmental and social) of their network. Second, the network traceability represents a way to provide customers further information about products and processes. Transparency of information becomes a source of competitive advantage that allows companies to differentiate themselves from competitors and build a responsible and reliable brand reputation.

In the fashion world, especially in the luxury segment, country of origin information becomes a guarantee of quality (not only in terms of product quality. but also of social and environmental production conditions). In this way traceability systems represent long-term strategic investment to create consumer confidence, strengthen the company image, and gain a competitive advantage in the market [START_REF] Karlsen | Literature review: Does a common theoretical framework to implement food traceability exist?[END_REF] [2]. Third, traceability can also be used to fight fraud in the market [START_REF] Li | Technology designed to combat fakes in the global supply chain[END_REF]. Because of the globalization and the increased use of e-commerce, there has been a strong increase in counterfeit products. Network traceability can be useful in ensuring product authenticity and protecting companies from unfair competition. Counterfeiting can take place at different levels of the chain, from sourcing to customer delivery and different methods (such as holograms, colour-shifting films or inks, sequential product numbering) or tracing technologies (such as RDIF, electronic product codes, barcodes, etc.) have been studied individually by fashion companies to ensure the authenticity of the product [START_REF] Li | Technology designed to combat fakes in the global supply chain[END_REF]. However, a multi-level and dynamic solution that can involve all actors in the network and integrate even different traceability systems is necessary to create an effective anti-counterfeiting mechanism. Fourth, traceability can also be implemented to improve control and communication within complex networks.

A better control of the network could be translated into a reduction in logistics costs (thanks to the reduction of defective products and inventories) and, strengthening cooperation between network partners [START_REF] Guercini | The integration between marketing and purchasing in the traceability process[END_REF] [START_REF] Karlsen | Literature review: Does a common theoretical framework to implement food traceability exist?[END_REF]. Fifth, network traceability allows a better product optimization both in terms of efficiency and quality assurance, by improving the control of network processes. For instance a network traceability system allows to recall only products really affected by quality issues, thus improving process efficiency as well [START_REF] Bechini | Patterns and technologies for enabling supply chain traceability through collaborative e-business[END_REF] [START_REF] Karlsen | Literature review: Does a common theoretical framework to implement food traceability exist?[END_REF]. Sixth, traceability can be a useful tool also to introduce product innovations being a way to facilitate the sharing of improvement proposals among supply chain partners [START_REF] Macchion | Improving innovation performance through environmental practices in the fashion industry: the moderating effect of internationalisation and the influence of collaboration[END_REF].

Finally, companies might choose to implement traceability even in the distribution to geolocalize customers and segment their shopping behaviours [START_REF] Karlsen | Literature review: Does a common theoretical framework to implement food traceability exist?[END_REF]. In this way, traceability becomes a way to achieve a strong differentiation in the market.

Traceability Practices

The development of traceability for the network still remains an open challenge in the fashion sector. A network traceability system should define the tools and mechanisms to transmit information, the data to be shared, the identification of each product as well as the country of origin of raw materials [START_REF] Regattieri | Traceability of food products: General frame work and experimental evidence[END_REF]. The perspective that a network traceability should consider is therefore not only functional, focused on what the system should do, but also organizational, paying attention to the functions and processes composing the system structure [START_REF] Hu | Modeling and implementation of the vegetable supply chain traceability system[END_REF]. Hence, one of the most critical aspects is the development of a complete inter-organizational traceability that could align different actors and ensure the data exchange in a standardized way.

Two key practices are required for the development of network traceability. First of all, the single Traceability Resource Unit (TRU) (i.e. the individual item or batch to be traced) should be identified [START_REF] Bechini | Patterns and technologies for enabling supply chain traceability through collaborative e-business[END_REF]. This unit of analysis varies depending on the type of company: for process companies, such as chemical firms, the object to be traced will be the batch; instead product companies, such as the fashion firms, the TRU will be the single product. The TRU evolves along the network as a result of production processes and such transformation must always be documented to guarantee the identification of each step within the network. Therefore the second point interesting the development of traceability practices is represented by the identification of the TRU supported by proper tags, for instance labels, barcodes, microchips or RFID, applied directly to each product or batch or indirectly by fixing the tag on pallets. To each TRU is assigned a code, mainly alphanumeric, with a unique and shared meaning for all actors in the network.

The sharing of product coding with all the actors in the supply chain is therefore a focal point, requiring chain partners to be responsible for the reliability of data provided [START_REF] Bechini | Patterns and technologies for enabling supply chain traceability through collaborative e-business[END_REF]. Production, movements and storage activities for each TRU will be thus mapped and monitored by all supply partners sharing traceability data [START_REF] Hu | Modeling and implementation of the vegetable supply chain traceability system[END_REF]. In any case the traceability practices to be implement in the network are strongly subject to specific constraints. In fact the most appropriate traceability system should be identified in accordance to technological and cost constraints, data accuracy possibilities, and reliability of network actors, thus requiring a study of the possibilities of the specific network.

Research Objectives

Previous studies mainly analysed traceability based on a single company or have analyzed the traceability issue applied to the entire network in sectors where the network traceability is set by regulations, for instance in the food networks [START_REF] Karlsen | Literature review: Does a common theoretical framework to implement food traceability exist?[END_REF]. However, other contexts in which actors decide to implement network traceability based on a voluntary decision require further insights. This research investigates this issue,considering the design and the implementation of a voluntary network traceability within the fashion industry,,from raw materials till the end customers and across different supply partners. In particular, fashion industry-specific drivers that led companies to adopt network traceability systems and best practices for network traceability are investigated. The following research questions are investigated: RQ1: Considering that traceability in the fashion industry is still and mainly a voluntary application, what are the drivers that can encourage the implementation of traceability systems within fashion collaborative networks? RQ2: What traceability practices are developed in fashion collaborative networks?

Methodology

Considering the explorative nature of the research questions the case study method is adopted [START_REF] Voss | Case research in operations management[END_REF], since it allows achieving a high level of understanding with observations and in-depth case study is particularly encouraged for the study of contemporary events within their real-life context since it it increases the external validity of results [START_REF] Yin | Case Study Research: Design and Methods, 2nd Edition[END_REF] [START_REF] Voss | Case research in operations management[END_REF].

The case study methodology is appropriate when the research is exploratory and the phenomenon under investigation is still poorly studied, as it offers the opportunity to achieve in-depth results through direct experience [START_REF] Voss | Case research in operations management[END_REF]. In setting the eligibility criteria for the case study, the selection included a company that: i) operate in the fashion industry; ii) are headquartered in Italy; iii) have international production and distribution networks (to include a company that have to address different environmental and social international regulations within their SCM); iv) is brand owners (thus they have the control of their whole SCM).

The organization involved in this research is one of the leading and most representative companies (in terms of turnover and number of employees) of the fashion system producing leather goods, footwear, clothing and accessories. We selected this company for theoretical reasons [START_REF] Eisenhardt | Building theories from case study research[END_REF] [23]: the selected case is recognized as exemplar [START_REF] Yin | Case Study Research: Design and Methods, 2nd Edition[END_REF] in the fashion industry and it is undertaking an important voluntary project of network traceability for its leather products, involving from third-tier suppliers till final consumers. We interviewed multiple key informants of the company and its suppliers. In particular, we organized with multiple interviewers many meetings with each network partner to cover the entire network traceability issues, achieve a higher level of reliability [START_REF] Voss | Case research in operations management[END_REF] and enhance the construct validity [START_REF] Eisenhardt | Theory building from cases: Opportunities and challenges[END_REF].

To ensure the validity of the collected data senior managers were involved in the research. We interviewed Chief of Sustainability Officer and specialists of the ICT function of the focal company; CEO and COO of slaughterhouse-3 rd tier supplier; CEO and COO of hide collector-2 nd tier; CEO, CSO, Quality Manager and Import-Export manager of the tannery-1 st tier; entrepreneurs, CEOs and specialists of selected façonniers. For triangulation requirements, internal documents provided of network partners were also analysed. Moreover, we had the possibility to visit and have direct observations of all network partners' plants to verify how traceability systems were implemented. Data collection phase took place from February 2013 to December 2013, and was supported by multiple investigators to reduce bias and enhance reliability [START_REF] Eisenhardt | Theory building from cases: Opportunities and challenges[END_REF]. A semi-structured interview protocol was specifically designed for this research [START_REF] Voss | Case research in operations management[END_REF], including questions concerning the traceability practices and drivers. All the interviews were recorded and then transcribed [START_REF] Yin | Case Study Research: Design and Methods, 2nd Edition[END_REF]. For every network actors, we stopped the number of interviews when we reached data saturation [START_REF] Eisenhardt | Building theories from case study research[END_REF] [START_REF] Voss | Case research in operations management[END_REF]. Finally, a case summary report were then prepared and reviewed by the research team to improve validity [START_REF] Yin | Case Study Research: Design and Methods, 2nd Edition[END_REF].

Findings

For what concerns main drivers (RQ1) leading to undertake a network traceability project, the research highlights that several traceability drivers already recognized in other sectors are confirmed also in fashion networks. In particular, the journey towards a traced network was moved by the desire of responding to sustainability pressures from the final markets and from NGOs (i.e. Greenpeace), which are raising always-higher attention towards the provenience of the raw materials and the Countries in which the different activities processes are executed [START_REF] Lion | Sustainability approaches within the fashion industry: the supplier perspective[END_REF]. Gaining comprehensive knowledge on all the partners involved in the supply activities and identifying the different Countries in which every supplier works are company's needs to be able to comply with local laws and have high assurance that processes and workers' conditions are environmental-(i.e. the use of dangerous chemicals during tannery and production stages) and social-(i.e. labour conditions) friendly [START_REF] New | The transparent supply chain[END_REF]. Moreover, in the long term the studied company wants to develop a green brand reputation and this goal starts from being unassailable on all network stages through a complete transparency over its processes and suppliers. This network transparency is considered a potential source of competitive advantage, by ensuring the improvement of the perceived quality of the made in effect.

Another strong motivation encouraging fashion companies to invest efforts on traceability project is related to the enhancement of network control and communication to improve the quality of products and components. In fact, the ability to identify the partners taking part in the development of a finished bag, and the related possibility of quickly identifying which partners are affected by quality problems once that a batch is recognized as damaged or not meeting quality standards, was one of the pillars of the network traceability project. However, the achievement of an enhanced control over the raw materials starts from the assumption that a higher level of network communication and integration is requested [START_REF] Guercini | The integration between marketing and purchasing in the traceability process[END_REF] by stipulating agreements with network partners and developing trust-based relationships for the exchange of data among all the involved actors.

Indeed, one of the drivers of this traceability project was the need to expand the already-existing transactional relations with suppliers to more collaborative ones. Company managers also wished to develop a traceability system useful to control the possible counterfeiting of raw materials and final products: as the products pertaining to the luxury fashion segment, positioned on a high price range, it is strongly critical to ensure the customer about the authenticity of the product and its components.

Moreover, the decision to start a network traceability project was driven by the necessity to refine marketing strategies and in particular to improve the customer geo-location. The application of a RFID tag on every finished product was the final solution implemented to realize this need. Differently from the literature in other industries, the system was not moved by legislation requests: in fact, there are no regulations that impose the adoption of a traceability procedure in the fashion sector, but anyway the analysed firm recognized the need to develop this system to proactively align itself to emerging new market needs.

As for the traceability practices within the fashion network (RQ2), food traceability practice were studied, and subsequently those practices were properly applied to the fashion network composed of many actors (i.e. farmers, slaughterhouses, hide collectors, tanneries, focal company, façonniers, logistic providers and retailers) and of many transformation points in which the raw materials can be joined, transferred, separated or assembled together. These transformation points can lead to relevant problems for traceability purposes [START_REF] Donnelly | The importance of transformations for traceability. -A case study of lamb and lamb products[END_REF]. In fact, in the case of foodstuffs, raw materials are often processed directly within one plant without any movements that could damage their healthiness. Below will be analyzed in detail the results to implement traceability with each fashion network partner.

Fourth-tier: Farmer. Traceability of livestock at the farms is already adopted: to trace every domestic animal the European food regulations require very strict traceability procedures composed by two ear-tags (with a tracking number), an electronic subcutaneous microchip, a passport containing animal tracking number and the development of an online database with all the information about animals life (for instance vaccinations, etc.) that are also registered within the passports.

Third-tier supplier: Slaughterhouse. Thanks to the collaboration with the food sector for which traceability of meat is required by legislation for healthy reason, until the skinning process the traceability of hides is guaranteed. But after it a critical traceability point emerges: by regulation only the meat is labelled and traced through all the downstream steps, where on the contrary hides traceability is not mandatory. To ensure traceability after this point, each hide has been identified by a plastic barcode label. This way all information related to the animal can be maintained. Hides can be then processed through a code scanner and sent to the hide collector with a shipping batch code linked to all the coded hides. Thanks to this traceability code, the hides can be separated based on the hides' country of origin since quality problems in the leather of final products comes from animals' country of origin.

Second-tier supplier: Hide collector. Since every hide is marked with a plastic label, traceability within processes of the hide collector (i.e. the actor within the network responsible for the quality leather selection) is preserved. Then, the shipping batch for the tannery is prepared: a new code, the shipping batch code, is generated by the hide collector and is linked to the previous plastic barcode. In this way it is always preserved the network information. As in the previous point, it is fundamental to prepare shipping batches based on the country of origin, for quality reasons.

First-tier supplier: Tannery. From this stage in the network the plastic code applied on every hide must be removed, since tannery processes are extremely aggressive and might delete the same code. Moreover, at this point the unit traced becomes the batch composed by many hides that are processed by the tanneries at the same time: all hides coming from the same farmer are processed in the same batch. Even if this means the loss of information on the single hide, this solution is suitable to reach the network traceability objectives, because it is always possible to obtain in every step of tannery process relevant data for network traceability (such as information related to the farmer from which animals come from). For what concerns traceability procedures within the tannery, information could be always traced using a code system that connects shipping batches and production processes.

Once again, the information related to the country of origin of batches are guaranteed.

The focal firm and its façonniers. Thanks to the implementation of a web ICT solution to share real time information with façonniers, the focal company is able to trace the hides' information during manufacturing processes. The batches shipped by the tannery are codified and registered in the web ICT system. When the focal company sends the batches to façonniers for the production processes, it assigns a proper code of production, which identifies the tannery information and the specific façonnier where the leather will be processed. This code is traced during all the production processes. After the manufacturing activities, every finished product is then associated with a RFID tag, which contains a serial number associated to all network information (such as production code, tannery's shipping code, etc).

From the focal firm to the retail store. Thanks to the RFID tag, traceability at single bag level can be guaranteed beyond this point till the end customer, since the tag can hold also distribution data, such as the store where the bag is shipped.

All in all, given the different network actors involved in the traceability project and their different internal traceability procedures, it was necessary to standardize data coding procedure to allow data to flow downstream, without interrupting the production workflow [START_REF] Bevilacqua | Business process reengineering of a supply chain and a traceability system: A case study[END_REF]. All critical points among network partners were connected using proper code numbers that could provide and ensure all data concerning the farmer, the hide collector, the tannery, the focal company, the façonniers and retail stores. As suggested by literature, every single traceability resource unit (TRU) was identified, coded and physically separated from others to guarantee proper identification [START_REF] Bechini | Patterns and technologies for enabling supply chain traceability through collaborative e-business[END_REF] [START_REF] Hu | Modeling and implementation of the vegetable supply chain traceability system[END_REF].

Conclusions

The study revealed that the drivers that moved the analysed fashion company toward the development of a traceability system were sustainability, product optimization, chain control and communication, counterfeit and competitive advantage reasons. All in all, if in the agri-food chain the protection of consumers' health is the main driver for traceability, in the fashion industry traceability is still seen as a source of an innovative market advantage, able to distinguish a network from competitors. Indeed, in the fashion industry the implementation of network traceability is considered a formidable strategy to better control partners [START_REF] Guercini | The integration between marketing and purchasing in the traceability process[END_REF]. Moreover, the ability to demonstrate the origin of raw materials and products responds to the need for transparency of environmental aspects, such as the use of dangerous chemicals during production stages, and social aspects, such as labour conditions [START_REF] Karlsen | Literature review: Does a common theoretical framework to implement food traceability exist?[END_REF].

Although drivers can be different [START_REF] Fiorentin | Analysing the features of modules and interfaces across the small consulting firms[END_REF], this research shows that practices used for the implementation of a network traceability in the agri-food sector can be applied to the fashion industry. However, strong collaboration is required for their application to share sensitive data. Accordingly to the literature [START_REF] Regattieri | Traceability of food products: General frame work and experimental evidence[END_REF] [2] [15] [START_REF] Bendaoud | A Methodological Framework to Design and Assess Food Traceability Systems[END_REF] [3] the case study highlights that to achieve network traceability some important aspects should be considered: 1. The identification of which products are involved in traceability practices; 2. The data to be collected, shared along the entire network and then transmitted to customers; 3. The ICTs required within the network for traceability.

This study shows how traceability is strongly related to the network coordination and integration. An effective network traceability is based on the exchange of relevant information between actors. Along this vein, proper network coordination and integration mechanisms should be developed to implement a traceability project and achieve the elimination of inter-organizational barriers. Information regarding finished products are not stored only at the single firm level, but are collected by every actor of the network and then shared to the downstream partners, requiring a high level of alignment and collaboration among all network partners. In this way products and information can be traced from raw materials till final consumers [START_REF] Engelseth | Food product traceability and supply network integration[END_REF].

Moreover, the development of network traceability involves very high costs that only through collaboration between all actors of the network can be supported. According to a sustainability point of view, network traceability allows the implementation of both environmental and social policies, through the effective control of the entire network, in particular of raw materials' suppliers and façonniers [START_REF] Zhu | Green supply chain management in China: pressures, practices and performance[END_REF]. In fact, customers are sensitive about Countries of origin of products and raw materials: some Countries do not have any laws to avoid cruel practices during slaughter processes, and thanks to many NGOs this critical situation and the related sustainability issues are reaching more and more interest by media. Achieving a complete network traceability within all production steps enhance the sustainability profile and ensure the transparency of production and sourcing processes that, starting from an animal, leads to the production and distribution of finished leather products. Unexpectedly, the case study also shows that after the implementation of the traceability project, the company noticed an effective improvement in quality and innovation of products too, thanks to the better alignment with suppliers [START_REF] Papetti | A RFID webbased infotracing system for the artisanal Italian cheese quality traceability[END_REF]. Through the development of a network traceability, the company is able to protect very distinctive and particular "made in" competencies [START_REF] Guercini | The integration between marketing and purchasing in the traceability process[END_REF] that could improve and increase the perceived product quality, based on the Country of origin effect. Moreover, customers are guaranteed about the authenticity of the product they are buying: the improved control along the entire network disincentive not authorised parallel markets, contributing to fight against counterfeiting [START_REF] Li | Technology designed to combat fakes in the global supply chain[END_REF].

From an academic point of view this research contributes to the OM debate on network traceability by adapting food-industry traceability practices to the fashion industry. First we identified the main drivers that lead a fashion companywhich is not forced by regulationto develop a traceability system. Second, we identified the practices that should be adopted to meet network traceability. Despite network traceability have been designed for other industries (e.g. for agri-food contexts), the main best practices can be efficaciously applied also within the fashion industry.

Our research has also implication for practitioners. We detailed the development of a project for network traceability that could be applied by other actors within the fashion leather industry. In particular we developed a system to connect traceability data across network partners, overcoming the problem of loss of traceability data on the single hide from the tanneries. The main limitation of our research is to rely on a single case study, even if in-depth. The analysis could be extended to a broader number of cases in the fashion industry. Besides, the selected case is a very large company, which has high commercial power on its supplier. The results may be different in the case of an SME as a focal company that wants to implement a traceability system within its network. Further studies may also consider the consumer's voice to verify how much traced products are appreciated and then understand if this feature will become a strong order-winner within the fashion system.

Finally, to enhance the debate in the network traceability field future work could deepen the differences between different industries (such as the food and the fashion sector) by considering the drivers and practices implemented.