Framework for sharing product information across enterprises

Collaborative product commerce (CPC) is a newly emerging technology to support inter-enterprise collaboration through the product life-cycle. From the information technology point of view, CPC is the software technology to integrate product, process and resources of different enterprises using Web technologies. In this paper, we introduce a framework for integrating product information across enterprises, which being developed as a part of the CPC project by ETRI. The product metadata represented by XML schema, which is compatible with ISO STEP PDM Schema standard, is presented to semantically and schematically integrate distributed product information. The web services technologies are discussed to support the interoperability of application systems related to the product development, such as CAD and PDM, where most of these applications run in a distributed environment. Finally, we implement the framework to integrate distributed product information and application systems.