Abstract

In the past, buyers and suppliers met each other to find common interests off-line in exhibitions and conferences, or through personal connection. These activities were time consuming and costly. With the advent of information era, these activities moved to online market places, where buyers search for suppliers with a set of keywords that are believed to be representative of their requirements. Its fundamental assumption is that all the potential candidates are registered in a certain database. However, recently buyers want to diversify suppliers due to needs of cost competitiveness or frequent new product develop-ment. To this end, instead of choosing suppliers from the supplier pool, discovering suppliers from all over the world should be emphasized. In order to enable buyers to describe their requirements and suppliers to capture their manufacturing capabilities via online market places, the semantic differences of terms between buyers and suppliers should be resolved. The paper summarizes various supplier discovery frameworks and prototype systems, which can be employed to expose domestic small-medium enterprises into global buyers in the near future.

Full Text
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