Product data integration in B2B e-commerce

Abstract

The dramatically increased flexibility afforded by the Internet in business-tobusiness transactions also presents steep challenges in merging information coming from so many sources. B2B marketplaces, which function as an intermediate communications layer, reduce the number of mappings needed for their user community from n * m to n + m (see Figure 1). However, to provide this service, they must deal with the problem of heterogeneity in their customers'product, catalog, and document descriptions. Effectively and efficiently managing different description styles becomes a key task for these marketplaces. In real-world marketplaces, developing a scalable approach for information integration has become the main prerequisite for scaling businesses.Successful content management for B2B electronic commerce must deal with several challenges: extracting information from rough sources; classifying information to make product data maintainable and accessible; reclassifying product data; personalizing information; and creating mappings between different information presentations.The lack of standards-really, the inflation and inconsistency of newly arising pseudostandardsmakes all these subtasks more difficult. As a benefit to both academics and industrialists who want to provide solutions for this key process in B2B electronic commerce, this article focuses on these challenges for content management and discusses potential solution paths. Information integration in B2B e-commerceA successful marketplace must integrate various hardware and software platforms and provide a common protocol for information exchange. However, the real problem is the exchanged content's heterogeneity and openness. This heterogeneity arises in at least three levels: the content, product catalog structure, and document structure.The content of the exchanged information must be modeled. Historically, many different ways to categorize and describe products have evolved. Often, vendors have their own private way to describe their products. Structuring and standardizing the product descriptions is a significant task in B2B e-commerce, ensuring that the different actors can communicate with each other so that their customers can find the products they want. Here, content management solution providers can offer added value by helping their vendors build and instantiate an ontology for certain product domains.E-commerce is about electronically exchanging business information-of which product descriptions are just one element. The product descriptions are an electronic catalog's building blocks, together with information about the vendor, the manufacturer, the lead time required, and numerous other business-related considerations. Furthermore, a catalog provider should include quality control information, such as catalog version, date, and identification number. The total composition of these

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