A Case Study in Integrating Multiple E-commerce Standards via Semantic Web Technology

Internet business-to-business transactions present great challenges in merging information from different sources. In this paper we describe a project to integrate four representative commercial classification systems with the Federal Cataloging System (FCS). The FCS is used by the US Defense Logistics Agency to name, describe and classify all items under inventory control by the DoD. Our approach uses the ECCMA Open Technical Dictionary (eOTD) as a common vocabulary to accommodate all different classifications. We create a semantic bridging ontology between each classification and the eOTD to describe their logical relationships in OWL DL. The essential idea is that since each classification has formal definitions in a common vocabulary, we can use subsumption to automatically integrate them, thus mitigating the need for pairwise mappings. Furthermore our system provides an interactive interface to let users choose and browse the results and more importantly it can translate catalogs that commit to these classifications using compiled mapping results.