Trading Regulations Infrastructure for Small and Medium Enterprises

SMEs need to compete in the global marketplace but are operating with an information deficit in the area of international trade regulations and access to documentation. Although some of the required documentation is on-line, currently there exists no SME-friendly infrastructure to assist the distributed population of SMEs in identifying, preparing and routing required the contractual and regulatory paperwork for trading including electronic contracts and tendering with international partners across multi-lingistic and multi-cultural barriers. Though the complexity of trading documentation (SAD) has been reduced within the EU and NAFTA internationalising trade still further pose immense problems of search, access, interpretation, routing, and support. This deficit constitutes a major barrier to the development of global trading for SMEs.

We are currently working on a system to provide SMEs with affordable and easily packaged access to existing and future databases containing trade information via intelligent data mining tools, to enable SMEs to take full advantage of the Global Information Infrastructure. We have initiated a collaboration between two teams, which collectively have complementary expertise in the areas of SMEs in the electronic marketplace and database technology, to develop a working prototype, which will be operational in a limited domain as an action research test bed aimed at facilitating access for SMEs to international trade regulations, documentation and interpretative support. The proposal brings together two main teams: 1) The European Team headed by University College Cork (UCC) and 2) a large-scale database development team based at the Institute for Global Electronic Commerce. The overall direction of the project would lie with the team at UCC Cork, which would act as the linking interface with the proposed USA-based large database team at UMBC. The Maryland team would act as the coordinating access point within the USA to the wider network.