Semantic Synchronization in B2B Transactions

Abstract

Despite the development of e-business standards, the integration of business processes and business information systems is still a non-trivial issue if business partners use different e-business standards for formatting and describing information to be processed. Since those standards can be understood as ontologies, ontological engineering technologies can be applied for processing, especially ontology matching for reconciling them. However, as e-business standards tend to be rather large-scale ontologies, scalability is a crucial requirement. To serve this demand, we present our ORBI Ontology Mediator. It is linked with our Malasco system for partition-based ontology matching with currently available matching systems, which so far do not scale well, if at all. In our case study we show how to provide dynamic semantic synchronization between business partners using different e-business standards without initial ramp-up effort, based on ontological mapping technology combined with interactive user participation.