WEAVE: An Automated System for Collating Unstructured Data from WEB and Legacy Sources to Enhance the MRO Supply Chain

Gleaning consistent and complete data from multiple sources of unstructured information is often a difficult and time consuming process. In this paper we outline the WEAVE® system which automates the structuring and collating of unstructured data from multiple on-line Websites. WEAVE® is presented in the context of the maintenance, repair, and operations supply chain. The underlying knowledge representation for WEAVE® is an MRO product ontology. This ontology drives classification of product descriptions harvested from Websites and attribute value extraction from the descriptions. The system uses logic programming to manage the ontology driven classification and extraction and the Java 2 Enterprise Edition platform and Open Business Engine workflow engine to continuously harvest and collate data from multiple MRO catalog Websites. It uses this coherent view of MRO data to allow a user to quickly locate and compare MRO products.