Knowledge and Information Systems REGULAR PAPER

Many e-business scenarios require the integration of product-related data into target applications or target documents at the recipient’s side. Such tasks can be automated much better if the textual descriptions are augmented by a machine-feasible representation of the product semantics. For this purpose, categorization standards for products and services, like UNSPSC, eCl@ss, the ECCMA Open Technical Dictionary (eOTD), or the RosettaNet Technical Dictionary (RNTD) are available, but they vary in terms of structural properties and content. In this paper, we present metrics for assessing the content quality and maturity of such standards and apply these metrics to eCl@ss, UNSPSC, eOTD, and RNTD. Our analysis shows that (1) the amount of content is very unevenly spread over top-level categories, which contradicts the promise of a broad scope implicitly made by the existence of a large number of top-level categories, and that (2) more expressive structural features exist only for parts of these standards. Additionally, we (3) measure the amount of maintenance in the various top-level categories, which helps identify the activelymaintained subject areas as compared A preliminary and shorter version of this paper was presented at the IEEE International Conference on e-Business Engineering, ICEBE 2005. M. Hepp (B) Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Semantics in Business Information Systems Group, University of Innsbruck, Technikerstrasse 21a, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria E-mail: [email protected]; URI http://www.heppnetz.de Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers, FL, USA J. Leukel University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany E-mail: [email protected] V. Schmitz University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany E-mail: [email protected]