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 non-persistent
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.
Keywords: B2B, Open Systems, Electronic Auctions, Semantic
Interoperability, Web Services, Ontologies
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