A Layered Integration Approach for Product Descriptions in B2B E-commerce

Electronic B2B marketplaces bring together many online suppliers and buyers, each of which can potentially use their own format to represent the products in his product catalog. To mediate the participants the marketplaces have to perform nontrivial mappings of these catalog formats. In this paper we analyze the problems, which occur in defining mapping rules able to translate between these formats. We advocate a three-layer product integration framework to resolve the difficulties, which occur during the integration. Particularly, we focus on the first two layers: the XML-based syntax layer and the data models layer expressed in RDF. The approach operates in three main steps. First, we create an RDF data model from the source XML catalog, which eliminates all syntactical peculiarities of the catalog. Second, the catalog is translated from the source model to the RDF model of the target catalog. Finally, the transformation from RDF to XML restores all syntactical regulations required by the target format. The approach is suitable for inter-operation with highlevel document and workflow ontologies.