Do E-Catalog Standards Support Advanced Processes in B2B E-Commerce? Findings from the CEN/ISSS Workshop eCAT

Application of a semantic product matching mechanism in open tendering e-marketplaces

“…Many efforts have been made to build up product ontologies from existing classifications and standard classification systems. These ontologies are rich sources of semantic information for interpreting product data of procurement documents (Schmitz et al, 2005) and can be used to enrich product descriptions with information from existing data sources. A generic and semi-automated method and tool called PCS2OWL has been developed by Stolz et al (2014) for deriving OWL ontologies from product classification standards such as CPV, UNSPSC (the United Nations Standard Products and Services Code) and eCl@ss.…”

Improving the usability of standard schemas

“…Unfortunately, there will always be competing standard schemas; different communities of users even within a single domain have different needs and views of the same underlying data. For example, [5] identified sixteen different e-catalog XML standard schemas. We can highlight the reason why so many standard schemas exist by considering a relatively simple business transaction: the placement of a purchase order.…”

“…This forces those responsible for selecting an XML standard schema to develop their own custom comparison frameworks for their particular domain and application. Within the e-business domain, [5] developed a six-level evaluation model (data types, vocabulary, documents, processes, framework and meta model) with three general criteria for analysis (the standardization organization and methodology and, the content of the standard schema). It was then necessary for the authors to review the documentation and content of every one of the thirteen e-business XML standard schemas being compared to determine if, and to what extent, each standard schema met the criteria set forth in their comparison framework.…”

“…This process requires users, such as domain experts, to be able to understand multiple standard schemas and possibly compare them as well which exacerbates the problem. The frustration that domain practitioners have experienced with these problems has been well-documented in the evaluation of the use of standard schemas in practice in many individual domains (such as civil engineering [2], commerce [3,4,5,6], finance [7,8], biology [9,10,11] and legislation [12,13,14]). While these studies validate that standard schemas fall short in exactly the scenarios above, they are focused on fixing the standard schema for the domain rather than the more global, cross-domain problem of how to deal with the fact that standard schemas will inevitably not be able to be used for all needs in all applications.…”