Strategic Industrial Alliances in Paper Industry: XML- vs. Ontology-Based Integration Platforms

Strategic alliances occur everywhere nowadays as a result of economy globalization. Goals of collaboration differ from alliance to alliance depending on industry, organizational, functional, social, legal, etc. aspects. Generally alliances have characteristics which are not a cumulative sum of characteristics of the parts. Collaborative business intelligence is one of the most desirable characteristics of long-run collaboration. The new opportunities should not be necessarily explicitly specified but should be derived automatically on case-by-case basis. To enable this there is a need to make a platform for integrated consortium (to manage the alliance goals, information and activities) not instead but in addition to existing platforms for consortium partners, which will still autonomously manage their local businesses. In this paper we discuss possible challenges for such integration taking as an example the Paper Industry alliance effort called PaperIXI. We analyze ongoing activities of the alliance (based on available information from open sources), which is promoting an XML-based solution, in contrast to our view, which is based on applying Semantic Web technology. Some motivating examples of industrial implementations based on Semantic Web technology provided by NASA activities are shown, which according to our view can be utilized for the PaperIXI alliance platform.