An ontology‐assisted analysis in aligning business process with e‐commerce standards

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this research is to articulate an analysis framework and a method for the cross‐national business‐to‐business integration electronic commerce (B2Bi EC) by exploring an ontology‐assisted schema and semantics resolution in the business process alignment with electronic commerce standards.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents an ontology‐assisted analysis method and alignment model in the implementation of the B2B electronic commerce standard specification over the existing trading partners' public processes in the syntactic and semantic integration and interoperability. An application of the Unified Modeling Language is made to analyze the public process in the domain and in the standard. Terms, concepts, relations, and links are created from the analysis results and converted into an ontology representation. Web Ontology Language is introduced to formulate the analyzed knowledge and experience to align the domain and the standard. There are correspondences and conflicts in the process of alignment. They are resolved via the shared and reusable ontology which is a convergence of the domain ontology and the standard ontology. The converged and shared ontology is achieved via a set of rules and heuristics that are created in the research.FindingsThe key of success in the B2Bi EC lies in the ability to accomplish the process interoperability and the schema comparability. Three main tasks have to be achieved to fulfill the requirements. This research constructs a prototype to implement the method. The prototype is used to illustrate the feasibility and validity of the method. A set of starter experiments has been conducted in use of a straight‐through example of a purchase order process in the alignment with the RosettaNet standard and the ebXML standard. The starter experiment serves as the baseline to demonstrate that the method is feasible and valid.Originality/valueA syntactic and semantic analysis method and alignment model are developed and demonstrated in the research. Integration and interoperability are accomplished in use of the systematic and analytic method.