Semantic web based distributed configuration

The importance of semantic based web services has been widely recognized and accepted by the industry and academic research. In this paper, we first motivate the demand for semantic based distributed production configuration taking place in the supply chain under B2B situation, then propose a solution for the configuration system, in which we apply the DAML+OIL Language to describe multi-layered ontology to model the knowledge base for communication and cooperation between distributed heterogeneous local configuration systems. The core idea of this paper is to combine the standards supported widely by industry (such as UDDI, SOAP, and WSDL) with the semantic web service ontology (DAML-S) issued by academic to build an open framework which utilizes their potential benefits and allows for semantically expressive advertising on the web that may be found and joined the supply chain for configuration product service or other service as well. Key word: distributed configuration, web service, semantic web, ontology model