Cross usage of web services and PLIB ontologies to define a B2B exchange process of product catalogues

The professional electronic commerce (Business-to-Business) relates to the computerization of the exchanges between companies and organizations or, in another term, it provides an inter-organization information system which makes it possible to do any type of automatic information exchange excluding any human intervention. In this context, handling data and knowledge information during the exchange process becomes one key issue in current computer technology and in PLM systems. Therefore, the design of ontologies, which provide a shared and a common understanding of a domain that can be communicated between partners and application systems, becomes fundamental to support exchange and to understand information. This paper proposes an approach that gathers both ontologies and web services technologies in order to build a B2B products exchange model. The proposed model allows companies to share information in different phases of Product Life Cycle Management. When such exchange is planned, it is usually achieved by providing answers to the following three major questions: Who are the actors of the exchange: (WHO ?). How this exchange is performed (HOW?) What kind of information or products are the subject of this exchange (ON WHAT?). Our paper presents a model providing a mechanism for supporting an exchange between companies. It proposes a platform which provides answers to the three questions cited above. To give answer to the HOW part, a software architecture is developed based on JAVA/J2EE Web service technologies, and on the PIP2A9 RosettaNet Business Process (BP) model provided as a choreography of exchanges. To answer the ON WHAT part, the PLIB ontology is used as a model of contents in order to describe the business elements that are the subject of exchange. It allows reducing semantic ambiguities that may occur when identifying products and theirs characteristics during exchange. Finally, to seek and to find the required Web services, a directory which list these Web services has been developed using the ebXML registry specification. This final part gives answer to the third part of the question: the WHO part.