Semantic Approach to Data Integration for an Internet of Things Supporting Apparel Supply Chain Management

Abstract

Abstract The rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the huge growth of valuable data produced by decentralising information processing along global apparel supply chain have led to a persuasive appeal for a semantic approach to integrating distributed data facilities in the field of self-determining collaborating logistics services. This paper describes a framework, Apparel Business Decentralised Data Integration (ABDDI), which exploits knowledge representation techniques and languages (e.g. Description Logics – DLs) to annotate relevant business activities, movements of products within the manufacturing network to provide value-added services. More specifically the paper discusses the DLs formalisms, which are used for knowledge representation in a decidable fragment of First Order Logic; and ALN (D) (Attributive Language with unqualified Number restrictions and concrete Domains) related issues. The paper presents an algorithm to demonstrate the DLs based entity concept similarity assessment to facilitate semantic web service. Finally, a business scenario is used to present some of the knowledge representation formalisms and concept similarity assessment in ABDDI.