Joerg Leukel

Price modeling in standards for electronic product catalogs based on XML

The fast spreading of electronic business-to-business procurement systems has led to the development of new standards for the exchange of electronic product catalogs (e-catalogs). E-catalogs contain various information about products, essential is price information. Prices are used for buying decisions and following order transactions. While simple price models are often sufficient for the description of indirect goods (e.g. office supplies), other goods and lines of business make higher demands. In this paper we examine what price information is contained in commercial XML standards for the exchange of product catalog data. For that purpose we bring the different implicit price models of the examined catalog standards together and provide a generalized model.

A quantitative analysis of product categorization standards: content, coverage, and maintenance of eCl@ss, UNSPSC, eOTD, and the RosettaNet Technical Dictionary

Many e-business scenarios require the integration of product-related data into target applications or target documents at the recipient’s side. Such tasks can be automated much better if the textual descriptions are augmented by a machine-feasible representation of the product semantics. For this purpose, categorization standards for products and services, like UNSPSC, eCl@ss, the ECCMA Open Technical Dictionary (eOTD), or the RosettaNet Technical Dictionary (RNTD) are available, but they vary in terms of structural properties and content. In this paper, we present metrics for assessing the content quality and maturity of such standards and apply these metrics to eCl@ss, UNSPSC, eOTD, and RNTD. Our analysis shows that (1) the amount of content is very unevenly spread over top-level categories, which contradicts the promise of a broad scope implicitly made by the existence of a large number of top-level categories, and that (2) more expressive structural features exist only for parts of these standards. Additionally, we (3) measure the amount of maintenance in the various top-level categories, which helps identify the actively maintained subject areas as compared to those which ones are rather dead branches. Finally, we show how our approach can be used (4) by enterprises for selecting an appropriate standard, and (5) by standards bodies for monitoring the maintenance of a standard as a whole.

Supply Chain as a Service: A Cloud Perspective on Supply Chain Systems

Supply chains are characterized by multiple firms providing their resources and processes to meeting customer demand in an efficient manner. There exists a great variety of approaches for solving the inherent coordination problem. It has been acknowledged that the autonomy of supply chain participants - and their business objectives - as well as the contractual relations between participants have to be maintained when designing a coordination mechanism. Often, new mechanisms are triggered by innovation in the software industry. This paper adopts the basic idea of Cloud Computing and takes a Cloud perspective on supply chain systems: It proposes to represent supply chains as a set of service offerings and customer demand as service requests; coordination is then a problem of determining optimal service compositions. We evaluate our proposal in a case study of airport service supply chains.

A modeling approach for product classification systems

Standardized product classification systems play a major role for searching and comparing offered products on electronic markets. Especially in the case of large multivendor product catalogs classified data becomes an important asset and success factor. The best known systems are UNSPSC and eCl@ss, however they are still developing, and new systems are emerging as well. Classification systems differ not only in content but also in structure from each other. The management and exchange of the systems between market partners must be able to get along with these differences. A common structure model, which can be used to specify XML business documents, is missing so far. The paper discusses the design of classification systems and develops a data model using XML schema. The model can be used for the transmission of classification systems, thus it is an innovative extension of existing product catalog standards.

A quantitative analysis of eCl@ss, UNSPSC, eOTD, and RNTD content, coverage, and maintenance

A significant part of data and content management in e-business scenarios deals with exchanging product-related data between business entities, and integrating them into target applications (e.g. ERP systems) or target documents (e.g. e-catalogs) at the recipients side. Content integration tasks can be much better automated if the textual descriptions are augmented by a machine-readable representation of the semantics. For this purpose, categorization standards for products and services, like UNSPSC, eCl@ss, eOTD, or the Rosettanet Technical Dictionary (RNTD) are widely in use. Existing research, however, has focused on the architecture and structure of such standards, and did not investigate their actual content. In this paper, we present a framework of metrics for the quality and maturity of categorization standards, and apply these metrics to eCl@ss, UNSPSC, eOTD, and RNTD. The results clearly show weaknesses which hamper the use in many application domains. Also, we can reveal that only some of these standards are actually maintained and updated, while others are rather inactive, dead collections

Supply chain management ontology from an ontology engineering perspective

Abstract Knowledge sharing and reuse are important factors affecting the performance of supply chains. These factors can be amplified in information systems by supply chain management (SCM) ontology. The literature provides various SCM ontologies for a range of industries and tasks. Although many studies make claims of the benefits of SCM ontology, it is unclear to what degree the development of these ontologies is informed by research outcomes from the ontology engineering field. This field has produced a set of specific engineering techniques, which are supposed to help developing quality ontologies. This article reports a study that assesses the adoption of ontology engineering techniques in 16 SCM ontologies. Based on these findings, several implications for research as well as SCM ontology adoption are articulated.

A Supply Chain Management Approach to Logistics Ontologies in Information Systems

Logistics models in information systems describe activities, organi-zations, transportation means, goods, and services being involved in logistics processes. The problem with most current such models, however, is a lack of formal semantics which prevents automated data integration across organi-zational boundaries. In this paper, we take the perspective of supply chain management and employ a well-grounded model which provides core concepts of interorganizational logistics. The contribution is that we (1) propose referring to supply chain management for ontologizing logistics models and (2) provide definitions of core elements of logistics ontologies.

Content metrics for products and services categorization standards

Products and services categorization standards, such as eCl@ss, eOTD, RosettaNet Technical Dictionary (RNTD), or UNSPSC, play a major role for the automation of content integration tasks, because they provide a consensual vocabulary that can be used for the tagging of product-related data along the various stages of the product life cycle. Eventually, the quality and usefulness of a given categorization standard is determined by its content, especially the coverage of concepts in the respective application domain, its structure and semantic consistency, and the level of detail provided. This paper proposes metrics for the content quality of products and services categorization standards, and applies those metrics to four prominent examples. It can be shown that there are significant differences between eCl@ss, eOTD, RNTD, and UNSPSC, which should both influence the choice of a standard for a specific business purpose and the maintenance strategies for the standards themselves.

Towards a Semiotic Metrics Suite for Product Ontology Evaluation

In recent years, product ontology has been proposed for solving integration problems in product-related information systems such as e-commerce and supply chain management applications. A product ontology provides consensual definitions of concepts and inter-relationships being relevant in a product domain of interest. Adopting such an ontology requires means for assessing their suitability and selecting the “right†product ontology. In this article, the authors (1) propose a metrics suite for product ontology evaluation based on semiotic theory, and (2) demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of the metrics suite using a supply chain model. The contribution of our research is the comprehensive metrics suite that takes into account the various quality dimensions of product ontology.

A Reverse Pricing Model for Multi-Tier Supply Chains

In recent years, reverse pricing has been marketed as a new pricing mechanism in e-commerce. Several e-markets such as priceline.com are being based on reverse pricing, thus on bids by potential customers instead of static prices by vendors. In this paper, we investigate whether it can also be used in business-to-business scenarios. In particular, we look at its potential contribution to reducing the bullwhip effect in multi-tier supply chains with local information and stochastic demand. The bullwhip effect suggests an increasing order variability as one moves down a supply chain. We propose to adopt reverse pricing for operational procurement decisions. We evaluate our proposal by conducting a simulation study using an agent-based simulation system, and can show that the novel approach results in a significant reduction of the bullwhip effect.