B2B integration - Aligning ebXML and ontology approaches

In B2B c-commerce, XML provides means to exchange data between applications. It does not guarantee interoperability. On the syntactic level, this requires an agreement on an e-business vocabulary. Even more important, on the semantic level, business partners must share a common view unambiguously constraining the generic document types. In this paper, we present a framework that brings together work in the area of ontologies and work in the area of XML-based data interchange, namely ebXML. The framework uses an ontology based on ebXML corecomponents expressed in RDF to allow for bridging between different c-business vocabularies. Since a bridging mechanism is required, but not specified within ebXML, our approach complements ebXML. The integration of the ontology-based approach into ebXML is realized in four major steps. In this paper we exactly identify the requirements and the architecture of each step. This provides exact guidelines for future research towards implementing these steps.