Local Ontologies for Semantic Interoperability in Supply Chain Networks

Most of the issues of current supply chain management practices are related to the challenges of interoperability of relevant enterprise information systems (EIS). In this paper, we present the ontological framework for semantic interoperability of EISs in supply chain networks, based on Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model, its semantic enrichment and mappings with relevant enterprise conceptualizations. In order to introduce the realities of the enterprises into this framework, namely their models, we define and implement the approach to generation of local ontologies, based on the databases of their EISs. Also, we discuss on the translation between semantic and SQL queries, a process in which implicit semantics of the EIS’s databases and explicit semantics of the local ontologies become inter-related.