Reclassification of Electronic Product Catalogs: The "Apricot" Approach and Its Evaluation Results

Electronic Product Catalogs (EPCs) are becoming more and more important as businesses interact electronically with one another and with customers. EPCs are the databases in which businesses store information about their products. EPCs allow customers to locate items they wish to purchase and business partners to access a business’s offerings. Typically each business’s EPC is organized to meet the requirements of one of many competing standards. Problems arise when various business partners use different standards to organize their EPC. Translating a product catalog from one standard to another manually is no easy task, even for a single item, and the typical EPC contains thousands of items. This situation is known as the reclassification problem. The paper describes the problem in greater details and also proposes a solution, which we dub “the Apricot approach”. The article starts with a brief overview about EPCs and classification systems. It then provides a description of the reclassification problem and describes existing solutions. Next, the Apricotapproach and its implementation are described. This article provides evidence that the Apricot Approach is useful and fruitful.