The dramatically increased flexibility afforded by the Internet in business-tobusiness transactions also presents steep challenges in merging information coming from so many sources. B2B marketplaces, which function as an intermediate communications layer, reduce the number of mappings needed for their user community from n * m to n + m (see Figure 1). However, to provide this service, they must deal with the problem of heterogeneity in their customers'product, catalog, and document descriptions. Effectively and efficiently managing different description styles becomes a key task for these marketplaces. In real-world marketplaces, developing a scalable approach for information integration has become the main prerequisite for scaling businesses.Successful content management for B2B electronic commerce must deal with several challenges: extracting information from rough sources; classifying information to make product data maintainable and accessible; reclassifying product data; personalizing information; and creating mappings between different information presentations.The lack of standards-really, the inflation and inconsistency of newly arising pseudostandardsmakes all these subtasks more difficult. As a benefit to both academics and industrialists who want to provide solutions for this key process in B2B electronic commerce, this article focuses on these challenges for content management and discusses potential solution paths. Information integration in B2B e-commerceA successful marketplace must integrate various hardware and software platforms and provide a common protocol for information exchange. However, the real problem is the exchanged content's heterogeneity and openness. This heterogeneity arises in at least three levels: the content, product catalog structure, and document structure.The content of the exchanged information must be modeled. Historically, many different ways to categorize and describe products have evolved. Often, vendors have their own private way to describe their products. Structuring and standardizing the product descriptions is a significant task in B2B e-commerce, ensuring that the different actors can communicate with each other so that their customers can find the products they want. Here, content management solution providers can offer added value by helping their vendors build and instantiate an ontology for certain product domains.E-commerce is about electronically exchanging business information-of which product descriptions are just one element. The product descriptions are an electronic catalog's building blocks, together with information about the vendor, the manufacturer, the lead time required, and numerous other business-related considerations. Furthermore, a catalog provider should include quality control information, such as catalog version, date, and identification number. The total composition of these
I n recent years, knowledge management has referred to efforts to capture, store, and deploy knowledge using a combination of information technology and business processes. 1-3 More specifically, organizations aim to acquire knowledge from valued individuals and to analyze business activities to learn from successes and failures. Such 42 computer.org/intelligent IEEE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS K n o w l e d g e M a n a g e m e n t T h e A u t h o r s Alun Preece has worked in the area of knowledge-based systems for 15 years, the last six of which he has spent at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. His current research interests are in distributed knowledge-based systems and industrial knowledge management. He received his PhD from the University of Wales, Swansea, developing decision support systems for health care planning. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society, the AAAI, and the British Computer Society Specialist Group on Knowledge-Based Systems and Applied AI. Contact him at
This article follows two previous articles by Alan Flett published in Business Information Review. It considers why auto-classification is so important to ensuring effective access to information and needs to be a fundamental component of contemporary Knowledge and Information Management (KIM) strategies and architectures. In doing so it considers the predicament of knowledge workers faced with the challenge of publishing findable information and presents the auto-classification principles and techniques that make this possible. Practical solutions are demonstrated with reference to Smartlogic's Semaphore product.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.