A New B2B Architecture Using Ontology and Web Services Technology

This chapter proposes an approach that integrates both ontologies and web services technologies in a business-to-business product exchange model. It defines a platform based on three levels required to build a generic and a new way for inter-enterprise exchange. The first level of this architecture is the discovering part, useful for localizing partners of exchange. The second level describes the business process part which provides a choreography of exchanges and the third level presents the content part that details the product characterization data. To support our findings, architecture is developed based on web services technology which is currently in exponential evolution. They allow systems to communicate with each other using standard internet technologies. Systems that have to communicate with other systems use communication protocols and the data formats that both systems understand. Such web services interest has coincided with the proliferation of XML, Java technology, and business-to-business commerce