Scalable Document Integration for B2b Electronic Commerce

Electronic marketplaces for B2B electronic commerce serve a great mission of bringing together lots of suppliers and buyers including small and medium enterprises into a world-wide global trade. These companies use different document formats and document sequences in their procurement chain and the marketplaces need to be able to easily plug these schemes in and to translate business information between them. Existing document transformation technologies require creation and maintenance of numerous complicated document transformation rules, which grow exponentially in number related to the number of marketplace customers. Rule complexity and their number hampers further development of the B2B mediation area. We seek the solution of the complexity problem in multi-layered information modelling, where the documents are translated between original XML serialization, RDF data model, and ontology instance. Complex transformations are reached thought concatenation of a number of simple transformation rules, which reduces required rule development and maintenance effort. We provide the solution of the scalability problem with an ontology-mediated document integration approach. Individual terminologies are aligned to the terminology from the correspondent document ontology maintained by the marketplace, and the transformation between document standards require linear number of links, instead of exponential in the non-mediated scenario. We validate the approach with practical experiences taken from integrating two leading document formats for B2B mediation area: cXML and xCBL. We consider the document integration task as a motivating application for Semantic Web technologies, focusing on further re-use of the proposed techniques.