CLASSIFICATION OF PRODUCTS AND SERVICES TO SUPPORT BUSINESS PROCESS ENGINEERING AND E-COMMERCE

Peter J A Reusch

doi:10.47839/ijc.2.2.219

Abstract

Decades ago individual approaches to classify products and services had been introduced within companies to unify products and to reduce stocks and costs. Other approaches had been introduced to support international trade and tariff systems. Today new approaches are introduced to support e-commerce and improve business processes. All these approaches are different in the way how to classify, what to classify, and what results to get – and the language they use. The harmonization of all these approaches is very difficult. But especially companies that want to take part in B2B-business need bridges between the different approaches. In this paper we first present a new XML-based system to remove the language barrier within classification systems and to improve data exchange. In the second part we present an implementation of classification systems based on topic maps according to the XTM standard to implement single classification systems and establish mappings between corresponding classes of different classification systems.

Highlights

In the second part we present an implementation of classification systems based on topic maps according to the XTM standard to implement single classification systems and establish mappings between corresponding classes of different classification systems
In Europe the most important product and service classification for e-commerce is ecl@ss 1, built by a network of supporting industries and managed by the Cologne Institute for Business Research2 – the authors of this paper are associated to this institute
A lot of other classification systems exist for special industries and within companies

Summary

INTRODUCTION

If a German buyer for example selects a class and its attributes based on the German classification and wants to send an order to a Spanish company, he is not able to switch from the class descriptions and attributes in German to the corresponding descriptions and attributes in Spanish – or any other language In his master thesis Gerd Rosarius[4] presented a new system based on XML and JSP to support the classification of products and services according to ecl@ss with additional assistance to work in different languages. This prototype system is the first step to improve data exchange. There are “universal” elements that hold the identification and the classification number, and there are elements for specific languages – the descriptions of the lightbulb in Russian, German and English, and keywords in

Gerd Rosarius

CLASSIFICATION OF PRODUCTS AND SERVICES BASED ON TOPIC

RESULTS

FURTHER RESEARCH