What is Application Class

One essential part of e-business is the exchange of product data between business partners. Classifications have been developed as a means to clearly describe the semantics of product descriptions. They provide schema elements like properties and classes and define their semantics by some formal relationships and some textual (informal) definitions. This chapter gives an overview about the modelling levels that have to be considered for the development and use of classifications. In addition, it introduces briefly ISO 13584 (PLIB) as one important data model for classifications and it characterizes a number of classifications which are used in today’s product exchange processes. Many of the classification standards use a quite primitive data model which leads to problems in their use and maintenance. By exploiting some features of more advanced data models, many of these problems can be overcome. The authors propose the introduction of additional class hierarchies as an example for adding more flexibility to a classification and discuss this proposal in the context of eCl@ss, an important European classification.