Ontologizing B2B Message Specifications: Experiences from Adopting the PLIB Ontology for Commercial Product Data

Data about products and services is of paramount importance in most inter-organizational business processes. For business-to-business (B2B) scenarios, a great number of XML-based message specifications are available, which cover various processes and types of transactions. These specifications support the respective data exchange tasks by providing a common representation for products and services in the form of syntactical conventions with some light-weight formal semantics. However, an analysis of the underlying models shows that technical product data and commercial product data are being represented in a fundamentally different manner. In particular show the commercial models both a higher syntactical complexity and more semantic heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose to align the representation of technical and commercial views on product data in message specifications. Our approach is based on the PLIB ontology, which was originally described in ISO 13584. We have evaluated our proposal by applying it to an industrial message specification for electronic catalogs, and can show that the novel approach reduces representational mismatches in B2B processes and simplifies systems integration in such scenarios