CEN/ISSS Workshop eCAT - a step towards multilingual electronic product catalogues

This paper presents the CEN Workshop "Multilingual Catalogue strategies for eCommerce and eBusiness" (CEN/ISSS Workshop eCAT). The eCAT Workshop aims at formulating a strategy for establishing a harmonised methodology for multilingual e-catalogues, and for implementing this methodology in a future full scale project on e-catalogues. The Workshop will not only lay the basis for a future implementation of a harmonised methodology for multilingual e-catalogues, but will also take into account the need for training experts and raise awareness on the subject. These are key issues for the future to help enable a high percentage of SMEs to become successful in e-commerce world-wide. The Workshop will closely cooperate with other initiatives in the field, including EU-funded RTD-projects – thus bundling experiences and competences from the private and public sectors. 2 CEN/ISSS WORKSHOP ECAT CEN/ISSS was created in mid-1997 by CEN (European Committee for Standardization) as the focus for its ICT (Information and Communications Technologies) activities. CEN recognised that the market needs of the Information Society could not be met through traditional standardisation methods alone, and that a new solution was required. The mission of CEN/ISSS is to provide market players with a comprehensive and integrated range of standardisation-oriented services and products, in order to contribute to the success of the Information Society in Europe. The current major activities include work in the fields of data protection and electronic signature, e-business standardisation and ecommerce (CEN/ISSS 2003). The Workshop "Multilingual Catalogue strategies for eCommerce and eBusiness" aims at formulating a strategy for establishing a harmonised methodology for multilingual e-catalogues, and for implementing this methodology in a future full scale project on e-catalogues. The Workshop will not only lay the basis for a future implementation of a harmonised methodology for multilingual e-catalogues, but will also take into account the need for training experts and raise awareness on the subject. These are key issues for the future to help enable a high percentage of SMEs to become successful in ecommerce world-wide. The Workshop is focussed on EU SMEs needs; it will also pay special attention to Central and Eastern European Countries and EFTA countries. The Workshop will closely cooperate with other initiatives in the field, including EUfunded RTD-projects – thus bundling experiences and competence from the private and public sectors. (CEN/ISSS Workshop eCAT 2002). The project will be carried out by a project team of experts from Danterm & Copenhagen Business School, (Denmark), Fraunhofer IAO (Germany), ISO TC 37 (Norway), Paradine (Austria), Sonnenglanz (Netherlands) and University of Essen, (Germany). The secretariat of the workshop is managed by TermNet on behalf of the Austrian Standards Institute. The work is divided up into three work items (see figure 1): WI 1 "Investigation and analysis of e-catalogues for e-business. State-of-the-art concerning the application of e-catalogues for e-business and recommendations for future development". WI 2 "Plans and concepts for a standardization strategy". WI 3 "Plans and concepts for pan-European implementation". The authors of this paper are responsible for work item 1.3 so the paper focuses on this work item. The objective of work item 1 is to provide an analysis which shall give a comprehensive picture of what happens in e-cataloguing globally and shall take into account a representative selection of institutions/organisations including e-marketplaces involved in the field, with a focus on the European situation. The analysis shall identify the existing problems in e-cataloguing and come up with recommendations for a systematic approach to overcoming these problems (CEN/ISSS eCAT 2002). The work item 1 is divided into the following five tasks: WI 1.1 “Survey on the use of existing ecatalogues in e-business – schemes, systems/tools, way of application”. WI 1.2 “Survey on existing major institutions/organizations supporting e-catalogue development in e-business and state-of-the-art in pertinent research”. WI 1.3 “Analysis of existing e-catalogues”. WI 1.4 “Analysis of the relation between (as well as application of) existing product classification schemes/product identification schemes and ecatalogues”. WI 1.5 “Formulation of problems and recommendations for a systematic approach to implement highly interoperable e-catalogues at SME level”. Figure 1. Work Items of WS eCAT. The following chapter gives an outline over the approach which is followed in work item 1.3. 3 ANALYSIS OF EXISTING E-CATALOGUES 3.1 Determination of the objects of investigation Standardised catalogue formats must not be seen as isolated from the higher context of standardisation in e-business; therefore they are a specific component within this context. E-business standardisation is a generic term for different standardisations in interorganisational and intraorganisational relationships. Here we limit the term e-business standard to those standards that explicitly address interorganisational WI 1.1 Survey on the use of existing e-catalogues in e-business – schemes, systems/tools, way of application WI 1.2 Survey on existing major institutions/organizations supporting e-catalogue development in e-business and state-of-the-art in pertinent research