Intelligent Information Integration in B2B Electronic Commerce

149 Pages·2002·4.031 MB·English

by  Dieter Fensel, Borys Omelayenko, Ying Ding, Michel Klein, Alan Flett, Ellen Schulten, Guy Botquin, Mike Brown, Gloria Dabiri (auth.)

INTELLIGENT
INFORMATION INTEGRATION IN
B2B ELECTRONIC COMMERCE
THE KLUWER INTERNATIONAL SERIES
IN ENGINEERING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE
INTELLIGENT
INFORMATION INTEGRATION IN
B2B ELECTRONIC COMMERCE
by
Dieter Fensel, Borys Omelayenko, Ying Ding,
Michel Klein, and Alan Flett
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Ellen Schulten
Heloise Ontology Associates, London, UK
Guy Botquin
Alexsys, Lasne, Belgium
Mike Brown
Global Transactions, Ltd., Berlin, Germany
Gloria Dabiri
Freie Universitiit Berlin, Berlin, Germany
SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, LLC
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Uncertainty in geometric computations I edited by Joab Winkler, Mahesan Niranjan.
p.cm.-(The Kluwer international series in engineering and computer science; SECS 704)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4419-5305-6 ISBN 978-1-4757-5538-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4757-5538-1
I. Geometry-Data processing---Congresses. I. Winkler, Joab. II. Niranjan, Mahesan.
III. Series.
QA448.D38 U53 2002
516' .00285--<lc21
2002028781
Copyright© 2002 by Springer Science+B usiness Media New York
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2002
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executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.
Permission for books published in Europe: [email protected]
Permission for books published in the United States of America: [email protected]
Printed on acid-free paper.
PREFACE
Information lies at the heart of our 21st century society. It is the fabric
of many modem social and economic activities, and increasingly so. The
worldwide massive adoption of Internet and Web is testimony to this. It
has become commonplace to speak of the Information Society and its
knowledge economy. This reflects a general awareness that recent
innovations in information storage, processing and exchange have
revolutionized our ways of communicating and thereby our economy,
culture, and society. Information has thus become like the air we breath:
ubiquitous, pervasive, a necessity of life, but seemingly invisible and
therefore often gone unnoticed. It makes itself only felt when it has
become polluted.
Business-to-business electronic commerce makes this nature of
information particularly clear. The World Wide Web has made it possible
that disparate enterprises collaborate in order to create value jointly as a
network. Such value webs, as we may call these constellations for B2B e
commerce collaboration, inherently produce, store, process, exchange
and share vast amounts of information. Value webs however have two
defming characteristics that complicate matters. First, their constituent
business actors are autonomous, and so they come with their own goals,
strategies, processes and, consequently, information. Second, they
generally are very heterogeneous, and so is their information. Network
based value creation requires interoperability of the needed common
parts of processes, systems, and the corresponding information. But
precisely this autonomy and heterogeneity in collaborative business
makes this a far from trivial task.
Attempts to solve the information interoperability task at the lowest
level of individual business actors are doomed to fail, as one runs into the
combinatorial explosion problem that unavoidably gets worse with the
number of connections between business actors. And it is inherent to e
commerce that this number is quickly increasing. A higher level of
solution is called for that exploits the commonalities in the information
PREFACE -VI-
within the value web as a whole. A promising way to make progress at
the network level is to focus on shared meaning of information, through
semantic reference models known as ontologies. After all, we can all
reasonably agree on what a table, computer, or bill is.
This book gives a timely, accessible, and in-depth survey of all the
issues involved. It discusses the challenges and tasks that must be tackled
in collaborative information processing in 828 e-comrnerce. Last but not
least it sketches some cutting-edge solution directions that will enhance
the interoperability of information within value webs in a way that
respects the autonomy and heterogeneity of the individual business
actors.
Hans Akkermans
Professor ofB usiness Informatics
Free University Amsterdam VUA
CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES ix
ABSTRACT xi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT xii
1. INTRODUCTION 1
2. THE INFORMATION INTEGRATION SUB-TASKS 5
3. INFORMATION STRUCTURING 17
4. INFORMATION CLASSIFICATION 33
5. INFORMATION RECLASSIFICATION 43
6. INFORMATION PERSONALIZATION 57
7. INFORMATION MAPPING 65
8. INFORMATION STANDARDIZATION 81
9. ONTOLOGIES IN B2B INFORMATION INTEGRATION 107
CONTENTS - Vlll-
10. CONCLUSIONS 127
REFERENCES 129
INDEX 141
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1. Preventing exponential growth in the number of mappings 3
Figure 2. The main sub-tasks in content management for B2B EC 11
Figure 3. Different types ofB2B information 14
Figure 4. Information Extraction 21
Figure 5. A sketch of the information extraction engine. 28
Figure 6. Classification of products 33
Figure 7. A screenshot ofGoldenBullet 41
Figure 8. The relation between the horizontal and vertical standards 43
Figure 9. The two sub-tasks of information re-classification 46
Figure 10. The example of mapping two horizontal standards 48
Figure 11. Aligning eCl@ss and UN/SPSC 49
Figure 12. An example for aligning concepts of a source and a target
catalog 54
Figure 13. An example for aligning attributes of a source and a target
catalog 54
Figure 14. Two fragments of product catalogs 68
Figure 15. A fragment of a direct transformation rule 69
Figure 16. The fragment of a schema for xCBL and cXML product
catalog data models 72
Figure 17. A fragment ofthe unified product catalog ontology 73