The data from the supplier of the supply chain provides relevant information for the customers only when presented in the appropriate form. The data is to be modeled for to be meaningful and make sense. In this chapter, the semantic web is introduced to bring out the meaning for the data. Hierarchical organization is proposed for the data to provide meaning for different players along the supply chain.
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The goal of information representation is to use minimum space or symbols for representing maximum data and convey maximum meaning. Often, it is in the form of familiar icons that the user can easily interpret and understand. E.g. Symbols used to distinguish ladies and Gents toilets. Especially, in dialog boxes, it conveys instant message to the user compared to the associated text. A picture is worth thousand words. For the same reason, interactive software GUI make use of icons very frequently. In the digital world, the representation of information is in the form of bits. In the analog world, it can be a graph, a picture, number etc.
Information representation has a say on the information lifecycle comprising of storage, retrieval and rendering of the information. The information serves no purpose unless it is rendered to the intended user in the anticipated format. The figure 1 shows how the data is organized in to information and knowledge.
Systems making use of artificial intelligence for knowledge or information representation (Gleb Frank, Adam Farquhar, and Richard Fikes, 1999) employ symbolic languages. The usage of intelligent elements is explained in detail in a separate section of this book.