A Knowledge Level Analysis of Information Integration Issues in B2B Electronic Commerce

Internet and Web technology starts to penetrate many aspects of our daily life. Its importance as a medium for business transactions will growth exponentially during the next years. In terms of the involved market volume the B2B area will hereby be the most interesting area. Also it will be the place, where the new technology will lead to drastic changes in established customer relationships and business models. B2B market places provide new kinds of services to their clients. Simple 1-1 connections getting replaced by n-m relationships between customers and vendors. However, this new flexibility in electronic trading also generates serious challenges for the parties that want to realize it. The main problem here is caused by the heterogeneity of information descriptions used by vendors and customers. This already caused some problems in manual trading or in direct 1-1 electronic trading. In the case of B2B market places it becomes to serious for neglected any further. Product descriptions, catalog formats, and business documents are often unstructured and non-standardized. Intelligent solutions that help to mechanize the process of structuring, standardizing, aligning, and personalizing are a key requisite for successfully overcome the current bottlenecks of B2B electronic commerce enabling its further growth. In the article, we discuss the main problems in information integration in this area and sketch several technological solution paths.