An ontology framework for multisided platform interoperability

Abstract

A successful B2B marketplace must ensure that suppliers and producers in a supply chain can find each other, communicate and negotiate in an effective way, while performing business processes. To this, we present an approach that involves two core ontology modules, e.g., the Catalogue Ontology and the Business Process Ontology, which can be extended by adding specific domain ontologies. For the representation of certain business aspects, the Catalogue Ontology exploits the Universal Business Language (UBL), while for the description of product characteristics related to different domains, this ontology makes use of the relevant industrial standards (e.g., the furniture ontology is based on the FunStep ISO 10303-236 standard and the eClass ontology is based on eCl@ss standard). The Business Process Ontology encompasses machine readable vocabularies for the semantic description of business processes and could be extended by adding new ontologies or data schemas. Finally, we validated the design and functionality of the ontology framework by defining and performing a set of queries related to product and services retrieval.