Semantic Interoperability in Electronic Business

E-business refers to the utilization of information and communication technologies (ICT) in support of all the activities of business. The standards developed for e-business help to facilitate the deployment of e-business. In particular, several organizations in e-business sector have produced standards and representation forms using XML. It serves as an interchange format for exchanging data between communicating applications. However, XML says nothing about the semantics of the used tags. XML is merely a standard notation for markup languages, which provides a means for structuring documents. Therefore the XML-based e-business software is developed by hard-coding. Hard-coding is proven to be a valuable and powerful way for exchanging structured and persistent business documents. However, if we use hard-coding in the case of nonpersistent documents and non-static environments we will encounter problems in deploying new document types as it requires a long lasting standardization process. Replacing existing hard-coded ebusiness systems by open systems that support semantic interoperability, and which are easily extensible, is the topic of this article. We first consider XML-based technologies and standards developed for B2B interoperation. Then, we consider electronic auctions, which represent a form of e-business. In particular, we represent how semantic interoperability can be achieved in electronic auctions.