A knowledge management paradigm in the supply chain

Supply chain management has profited tremendously from the advance of Web technologies during the last decade. New applications as well as optimized existing applications have used the Web as the medium to provide efficient and effective services to internal and external company users. The new paradigm in the universal World Wide Web is the semantic web, where the use of ontologies allows for knowledge management in ways that were not possible before. The supply chain management sector can benefit immensely by moving toward such technologies. The basic elements of a prototype knowledge management system for supply chain management are presented in this paper. In these basic characteristic sets of ontologies we examine how the semantic web can provide considerable improvements over previously used paradigms.