Innovation and Ontologies

148 Deployment in Business
2.1.4 Evaluation
The three enterprise ontologies each provide a framework for modeling an (e-) business activity.
Mainly driven by research, they are seminal contributions to the community; unfortunately, there
is no data available on their actual application by companies.
2.2 E-Business (B2B) Ontologies
[…] B2B markets have not reached a conseus on coding systems, […],
‘which is an obstacle for the interoperability of applications
following different standards. (Gómez-Pérez, Fernández-López & Corcho, 2004)
The popularity of the World Wide Web and the corresponding growth of new web-based
technologies have entailed the creation of many e-commerce applications (Fensel, 2001). In the
context of e-commerce, particularly for business to business exchange (B2B), effective
communication between machines is a key factor. Consequently, a number of standard setting
efforts have evolved to ease information exchange by frameworks. Codified with different
computation languages and formats and agreed by a wide group of institutions, they provide
consensus and top-level terms to classify products and services. As they merely consist of
concept taxonomies and some relations, they are considered lightweight ontologies 174 (Gómez-
Pérez, Fernández-López & Corcho, 2004).
The first subsection of this part provides information about the term Semantic Web (cf. 2.2.1). Its
functionalities form the heart of the subsequently described e-commerce applications. Then the
section strives to provide a bird’s eye perspective on four widely accepted proposals of e-business
ontologies: first, two systems are introduced which rely on a numeric classification (cf. 2.2.2). Ecl@ss,
though equally based on numbers, is treated separately in 2.2.3. It particularly addresses
the B2B relation of supplier and customer. The last example, Rosetta Net, is outstanding by being
a self-funded industry effort and bein based on term names instead of numbers (cf. 2.2.4). The
subsection 2.2.5 concludes with a short evaluation of the described classifications.
2.2.1 Semantic Web
One of the driving forces for recent ontology research is the so-called Semantic Web proposed by
Berners-Lee, the ‘godfather’ of today’s World Wide Web (Berners-Lee, Hendler & Lassila, 2001;
Shadbolt, Berners-Lee & Hall, 2006). For the past years, information on this World Wide Web
has mainly been intended for direct human consumption. With time, it has become necessary to
facilitate new intelligent applications like meaning-based search, information brokering, and B2B
transactions which are also accessible for machines (Klein et al., 2002).
174
For the distinction among lightweight and heavyweight ontologies, cf. 5.4.4. Heavyweight ontologies encompass, besides classes and relations,
also rules and axioms.