Common Textile Vocabularies and Documents: A Conceptual Foundation of a Globally Interoperable Textile e-Marketplace

This paper has proposed a novel common textile vocabulary and document framework (TexVDF) in a collaborative network to enable cross-domain level business information sharing and business document exchange in a semantically consistent way. The approach to this framework is motivated through presenting some real-world examples of business inquiries with product specifications. By these examples, two problems are detected on how to achieve semantic commonality between cross-domain level business vocabularies for textile e-Marketplace mediators and how to allow specificity of cross-domain level common business document templates for local textile e-Marketplace mediators yet still maintaining semantic consistency. To solve these two problems, this paper has firstly reviewed CONEX technologies relevant to the newly developed TexVDF approach, which includes a TexVDF framework, a P2P collaborative textile concept mapping model and a textile business document template model. These two models have been demonstrated by examples to see how they should work.