Preliminary Ontology Modeling for B2B Content Integration

Content Management becomes a cornerstone issue of successful B2B electronic commerce. B2B marketplaces bring together many online suppliers and buyers, which use different standards to describe their products. Particularly, they use different content standards to specify the products with product classification hierarchies and product attributes, and different catalog representation standards to represent product catalogs. Content standards need to be linked to product catalog documents. In the paper we discuss how a multi-layered B2B information integration framework must be extended with these links. In addition, content standards must be integrated to enable content-based product search. Further content integration techniques depend on a number of issues inspired by the nature of content standards and the purpose of integration, also discussed in the paper.