For the Paper “An Ontology Framework for Multisided Platform Interoperability” as part of the NIMBLE Project, the research team with Violeta Damjanovic-Behrendt and Dietmar Glachs from Salzburg Research received the Most Innovative Solution Award. The paper was presented at I-ESA 2018: Interoperability for Enterprise Systems and Applications in Berlin in March.

The paper presents an approach to ontology-based enterprise interoperation that involves two core ontology modules: the Catalogue Ontology and the Business Process Ontology.

The paper is available online at: https://www.nimble-project.org/papers/

Abstract:

Business-to-Business (B2B) enterprise systems and services have become increasingly important for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) over the last few years. Their major potential can be seen in the massive reduction of business transaction costs and an enhanced cross-sectoral coordination. A successful B2B marketplace must ensure that suppliers and producers in a supply chain can find each other, communicate and negotiate in an effective way, while performing business processes. The presented approach involves two core ontology modules, e.g. the Catalogue Ontology and the Business Process Ontology, which can be extended by adding specific domain ontologies. For the representation of certain business aspects, the Catalogue Ontology exploits the Universal Business Language (UBL), while for the description of product characteristics related to different domains, this ontology makes use of the relevant industrial standards. For example, the furniture ontology is based on the FunStep ISO 10303-236 standard and the eClass ontology is based on eCl@ss standard. The Business Process Ontology encompasses machine readable vocabularies for the semantic description of business processes, and could be extended by adding new ontologies or data schemas. Finally, we validated the design and functionality of the ontology framework by defining and performing a set of queries related to product and services retrieval.