Experiences from Ontology Development for Service Innovation in Transportation Industries

Many industries experienced a shift in sourcing and logistics strategies, the industrial demand for more dynamic logistics solutions with adequate IT support is increasing. Due to advances in wireless sensor networks and technologies, the transportation area in logistics industry is the most promising application field for new types of innovative services. The emerging applications in this field require an integrated knowledge base to provide enhanced customer services. The aforementioned trends will lead to service innovation if the adaptation of business models is ensured. Our earlier work focused on adaptable business models [1] and argued that knowledge representation techniques are suitable concepts to improve selforganization [2]. In this paper we introduce the core component of the knowledge architecture represented as ontologies and report experiences from the development process. The contributions of this paper are (a) a detailed description of the ontology construction process based on a realworld scenario, (b) experiences from the development process and, (c) proposed adaptations of an established ontology engineering approach.