Fierce competitions and pursuits of excellence require all applications, internal or external, to be integrated for business-to-business communications. Standards play an important role in fulfilling the requirement. This dissertation focuses on Business-to-Business standards or XML-based frameworks for Internet commerceFirst, we analyze what the standards are and how they interact. Fifteen influential standards are selected: eCo Framework, ebXML, UBL, UDDI, SOAP, WSDL, RosettaNet, Open Applications Group, VoiceXML, cXML, Wf-XML, OFX, ICE, RDF, and OWL. Basically each standard has to provide transport mechanisms and message structures for general and/or specific applications. In terms of message structure definition, they can be classified as two types: syntax-based, for defining messages syntactically and semantics-based, like RDF and OWL for defining messages semantically.Second, for transiting from syntax to semantics, we provide a reuse-based method to develop the ontology by reusing existing XML-based standards. This is a kind of knowledge reuse, for instance, using previously developed structures, naming conventions and relationships between concepts.Third, we exploit how to use these standards. We propose an approach that combines RDF and OWL with SOAP for building semantic Web services. Three levels of combinations are provided: Simple Reference, Direct Embedment, and Semantic SOAP.Fourth, we design an infrastructure aimed at creating a formal channel by using Web services and semantic Web for establishing buyer awareness, i.e., buyers first become aware of products/promotions offered by sellers. We propose the concept of personal ontology, emphasizing that ontology is not only a common and shared conceptualization but also can be used to specify personal views of the products by sellers and buyers. The agreements between buyers and sellers can be described in XML schema or ontology in OWL. A semantic matchmaking algorithm is designed and implemented considering synonym, polysemy and partial matching.
['Yuxiao Zhao', 'Kristian Sandahl']
XML-Based Frameworks for Internet Commerce