Toward Self-Integrating Software Applications for Supply Chain Management

Each paper in this special issue deals with a particular aspect of supply chain management. Nevertheless, they all point to a common need for meaningful and timely information exchange across the supply chain. The Internet and the existing Web technologies have made the exchange of information essentially free and instantaneous. On the other hand, determining the meaning of that information, which we call integration, is still very costly. Millions of dollars and hundreds of man-years have been spent developing and coding interface specifications and software applications to achieve this integration. While this approach has been successful in the past, it is not a viable approach for the future in which the Semantic Web is becoming an important business strategy. In this paper, we discuss a new approach, called self-integration in which software applications are imbedded in an environment that allows them to integrate automatically. We first provide some background information on integration and then focus on our research on semantic querying, semantic mapping, and semantic inferencing.