Ellen Schulten

Product data integration in B2B e-commerce

To overcome current bottlenecks in business-to-business (B2B) electronic commerce, we need intelligent solutions for mechanizing the process of structuring, standardizing, aligning and personalizing data. This article surveys the overall content management process and discusses requirements for its scalable support.

The Role of Ontologies in eCommerce

Web technology is starting to penetrate many aspects of our daily life and its importance as a medium for business transactions will grow significantly during the next few years. In terms of market volume, B2B will be the most interesting area where new technology will lead to drastic changes in established customer relationships and business models. Simple and established one2one trading relationships will be replaced by open and flexible n2m relationships between customers and vendors. However, this new flexibility in electronic trading also creates serious challenges for the parties who want to realize it. The main problem is the heterogeneity of information descriptions used by vendors and customers. Product descriptions, catalog formats, and business documents are often unstructured and non-standardized. Intelligent solutions that help to mechanize the process of structuring, standardizing, aligning and personalizing are key requisites to successfully overcoming the current bottlenecks of eCommerce and enabling its further growth. This paper discusses the main problems of information integration in this area and describes how ontology technology can help solve many of them.

Call for Participants: The E-Commerce Product Classification Challenge

This article launches an international research challenge in the area of intelligent e-business. The challenge is to come up with a generic model and working solution that can semiautomatically map a given product description between two different e-commerce product classification standards.

Intelligent Information Integration in B2B Electronic Commerce

Internet and web technology penetrates many aspects of our daily life. Its importance as a medium for business transactions will grow exponentially during the next few years. In terms of the involved market volume, the B2B area will hereby be the most interesting area. Also, it will be the place, where the new technology will lead to drastic changes in established customer relationships and business models. In an era where open and flexible electronic commerce provides new types of services to its users, simple 1-1 connections will be replaced by n-m relationships between customers and vendors. This new flexibility in electronic trading will generate serious challenges. The main problem stems from the heterogeneity of information descriptions used by vendors and customers, creating problems in both manual trading and in direct 1-1 electronic trading. In the case of B2B market places, it becomes too serious to be neglected. Product descriptions, catalog formats and business documents are often unstructured and non-standardized. Intelligent solutions that mechanize the structuring, standardizing, aligning, and personalizing process are a key requisite for successfully overcoming the current bottlenecks of B2B electronic commerce while enabling its further growth. Intelligent Information Integration in B2B Electronic Commerce discusses the main problems of information integration in this area and sketches several technological solution paths. Intelligent Information Integration in B2B Electronic Commerce is designed to meet the needs of a professional audience composed of researchers and practitioners in industry and graduate level students in Computer Science.

Ontologies in B2B Information Integration

Information integration is an important process in building electronic marketplaces. Different parties in electronic commerce transactions often use different product classifications, different product catalogues, and different business documents. To enable co-operation and commerce between parties that use different representation for their domain of interest, the information structures that they use should be made compatible and interoperable.

The Information Integration Sub-Tasks

B2B marketplaces need to be open to large numbers of suppliers and buyers. Their success is closely related to their ability to mediate a large number of business transactions. Various studies expect up to 10,000 B2B marketplaces in the near future. This number may fall again when consolidation happens, and recent studies already predict meta-marketplaces combining several marketplaces.1 In any case, B2B marketplaces are an intermediate layer for business communications providing their clients with one key advantage: they can communicate with a large number of customers through one communication channel to the marketplace. The marketplaces reduce the number of mappings to their user community from n*m to n+m. However, in order to provide this service, they have to solve the significant mapping and normalization problem for their clients. A successful marketplace has to deal with various aspects. It has to integrate with various hardware and software platforms and provide a common protocol for information exchange. However, the real problem is the heterogeneity and openness of the exchanged content. There are at least three levels at which this heterogeneity arises: the content level, at the level of product catalogs structures, and the level of document structures.