Semantic Web-Based Supplier Discovery Framework

Abstract

Abstract. As companies move forward to source globally, supply chain management has gained attention more than ever before. In particular, the discovery and selection of capable suppliers has become a prerequisite for a global supply chain operation. Manufacturing e-marketplaces have helped companies discover new suppliers and/or buyers fast and effective for their products and services. Due to the description of requirements and capabilities in isolation, their true meanings may not be uniformly interpreted from each other. The issue of semantics between suppliers and buyers, then, remains an obstacle.The main objective is to propose a semantic web-based supplier discovery framework for building a long-term strategic supply chain. Specifically, 1) a collaboration ontology is developed to represent the supplier's capability information and the buyer's requirements. 2) Supplier's potential capability is reasoned. 3) Buyer's requirements are semantically matched with supplier's capability information. In addition, a prototype demonstrates the practicality of the framework.

Making Strategic Supply Chain Capacity Planning more Dynamic to cope with Hyperconnected and Uncertain Environments

“…For the first type of contribution, the following approaches were found for gathering and consolidating information about supply chain stakeholders' capabilities from distributed data sources: website search [36], dynamic forms completed by stakeholders [38], [39], and peer-to-peer platform software [45]. For the second type of contribution, the following approaches were found for matching supply chain stakeholders' capabilities with buyers' requirements stored in a centralized data source: semantic reconciliation approaches to find matches [29]- [34], [38]- [41], [43], ontologies to structure information [29]- [34], [38]- [41], [43], [44], and semantic clustering of supply chain stakeholders' capabilities in a classification tree to classify and retrieve capabilities [42]. As part of the second type of contributions, the report by Fenves et al [37] from the U.S. Department of Commerce and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) highlights the need for a taxonomy to share a common terminology among supply chain stakeholders to support supply chain stakeholder identification.…”

“…In addition to the contributions introduced by the reviewed papers, some mention existing online services provided by businesses to match supply chain stakeholders' capabilities with buyers' requirements from a centralized data source (e.g., www.alibaba.com, www.ec21.com, www.mfg.com) [40], [41], [44]. They are defined by authors as "e-marketplace" or "esourcing portals".…”