TOWARDS ONTOLOGY BASED E-BUSINESS STANDARDS
Bahareh Rahmanzadeh Heravi, David Bell, Mark Lycett
Department of Information Systems and Computing, Brunel University, Uxbridge, London, UB8 3PH, U.K.
Stephen D. Green
Document Engineering Services, Cambridgeshire, CB6 2AP, U.K.
David Snelling
Fujitsu Laboratories of Europe Ltd., Hayes Park Central, Hayes, Middlesex, UB4 8FE, U.K.
Keywords: e-Business Standards, B2B Process, Ontology, Semantic Web, Semantic Standards, Standard Development.
Abstract: e-Business standards are recognised as one of the most important drivers of Business to Business
Integration. These standards seek to provide unambiguous specifications for error-free exchange of
documents and information between trading partners. These standards are however, syntax based and do not
guarantee semantic interoperability between partners. This paper proposes the utilisation of semantic web
technologies in the standards development process, aiming at developing more robust and at the same time
flexible e-Business standard. In order to extract the requirements of an ontology based standard, a combined
top down and bottom up approach has been adopted. This resulted in developing two ontologies: one for e-
Business standards in general and one for ebXML Business Process Specification Schema (ebBP) as a
specific e-Business standard. The challenge is to address the distance between these two ontologies and
explore how ontologies can be utilised in developing next generation e-Business standards. It is believed
that ontology based e-Business standards will enhance interoperability between organisations involved in
value networks and also may facilitate the standard development process itself.
1 INTRODUCTION
Inter-organisational collaborations are effective
means of gaining competitive advantage and
improving effectiveness for today’s organisations. In
such an environment, collaborating parties’ business
processes and their associated documents need to be
understood and aligned across organisational
boundaries. E-business standards are traditionally
used for achieving interoperability between trading
partners and aimed at error-free exchange of
documents and information. E-business standards,
however, only provide syntactic and not semantic
interoperation, since they are mainly based on XML,
whose provision for semantic knowledge sharing is
particularly restricted.
Singh, Iyer and Salam (2005a) provide a vision for
Semantic e-Business which is based on Tim
Berners-Lee’s Semantic Web vision (Berners-Lee,
Hendler & Lassila, 2001). In this vision, semantic e-
Business is introduced as an approach to managing
knowledge for the coordination of e-Business
processes through the systematic application of
Semantic Web technologies (Singh, Iyer & Salam,
2005b). They argue that Semantic e-Business will be
enhanced through more rigorous information and
knowledge exchange. Ontologies can capture the
definitions and interrelationships of concepts in a
variety of domains, resulting in a shared
understanding of the domain, which is indeed the
ultimate goal of e-Business standards.
This paper explores the intersection of the e-
Business standards and the ontologies, with the aim
of improving e-Business standards, which in turn
better facilitate B2B integration. This can have a
significant effect on research community as well as
practitioners, who are involved in value networks.
169
Rahmanzadeh Heravi B., Bell D., Lycett M., Green S. and Snelling D. (2010).
TOWARDS ONTOLOGY BASED E-BUSINESS STANDARDS.
In Proceedings of the International Conference on e-Business, pages 169-175
DOI: 10.5220/0002995901690175
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

The remainder of this paper is structured as
follows: Section 2 provides a background on e-
Business standards and the structure of standards in
general. Section 3 explores the use of ontologies in
eBusiness standards. Section 4 introduces the
concept of ontology based e-Business standards and
its benefits, provides a methodology for deriving an
ontology for e-Business standards and presents a
work in progress ontology on that basis. Section 5
presents the challenges associated with utilising
ontologies as a basis for e-Business standards,
followed by a discussion on the next steps of the
research and a set of research questions. Section 6
concludes the paper.
2 E-BUSINESS STANDARDS
A standard is a technical specification approved by a
recognised standardisation body, which is designed
to be used consistently, as a rule, a guideline, or a
definition across particular communities of interest,
to achieve mutual benefit (ETSI, 2010). Acquiring
‘standard’ status may take several years. During this
time a specification may be implemented if it
receives sufficient public review and achieves a
certain level of approval. The specification’s use
may be widespread even without full
standardisation.
 Openness of standards /
specifications is usually considered as an important
factor in achieving consensus and widespread
adoption. When agreed as a ‘standard’, it may only
be the status of the specification which changes.
Each specification / standard is composed of a set
of Normative Statements, often with a Conformance
Clause and associated Test Assertions.
A Normative Statement defines the prescriptive
requirements on a conformance target (Green,
Kostovarov, 2009). In the standardisation
terminology conformance refers to the fulfilment of
specified requirements by an implementation of the
standard. This is verified with the use of
Conformance Clauses, which must, directly or
indirectly, reference one or more Normative
Statements and may also refer to another
Conformance Clause (Green, Kostovarov, 2009).
Furthermore, a Test Assertion is an independent,
complete, testable or measurable statement for
evaluating the adherence of part of an
implementation to a Normative Statement in a
specification (OASIS TAG TC, 2010)(Durand,
Green, Kulvatunyou, Rutt, 2009 ).
E-Business standards seek to establish
Interoperability between trading partners by defining
standard interfaces specifying one or more common
Business Processes, elements of the Business
Documents and / or Messaging details. Figure 1
presents an Interoperability Stack for e-Business
standards and specifications. E-business
specifications may cover one or more of the layers in
the stack.
Business Process Definition Languages
ebBP, WE-BPEL, WS-CDL, XPDL, …
Business Processes Patterns
UBP, OAGIS Scenarios, RosettaNet PIPs
Business Process Modelling Notations
BPMN, UML
Business
Context
UCM
Business Documents
UBL, OAGIS, RosettaNet
Interoperability
Profiles
NESUBL,
OIOUBL,...
Communication Layer
ebMS, RosettaNet RNIF, ...

Figure 1: e-Business Interoperability Stack.
The Communication layer provides specifications
for packaging, security and transport of messages to
be used within business interactions. ebXML
Messaging Service (ebMS) and RosettaNet
Implementation Framework (RNIF) are examples of
specifications from this layer.
Business Process Modelling Notations are
specifications which are used for graphical
representation of processes and do not have XML
representation. Business Process Modelling Notation
(BPMN) and UML Activity diagrams are examples
from this layer.
Business Process Definition Languages provide
specifications for XML based representation of
business processes. These languages can have
different targets. For example they might be suitable
for public choreographies, such as ebXML Business
Process Specification Schema (ebBP), for business
process execution, such as WS-BPEL or for private
workflows such as XPDL. These processes may be
visualised by Business Process Modelling Notations.
The next level, Business Process Patterns, provide
specifications for repeatable processes which need to
be agreed between trading partners, such as
procurement processes. These processes can be
industry neutral or industry specific depending on
the target of the specification. UBP (Universal
Business Process) and OAGIS (Open Applications
Group Integration Specification) Scenarios are
examples of industry neutral processes and
RosettaNet PIPs are examples of industry specific
business processes. These processes may be
represented by Business Process Definition
ICE-B 2010 - International Conference on e-Business
170

Languages and / or visualised by Business Process
Modelling Notations.
B2B transactions are composed of Business
Document exchanges, within the steps of Business
Processes. Therefore, the next layer represents
Business Document specifications, such as UBL
(Universal Business Language) and xCBL (XML
Common Business Library. Business Document
standards can also be industry specific or industry
neutral.
Business Context is another layer in the e-
Business Interoperability stack and provides
contextual information to be used in Business
Documents and Business Process specifications.
Unified Context Methodology (UCM) is an example
from this layer, which is a UN/CEFACT
specification and aims at facilitating context-
sensitive modelling of e-Business transactions.
Interoperability Profiles are subsets of standard
specifications which focus on specific business
processes or industries. Northern European Section
UBL (NESUBL) is an example from this layer.
Currently e-Business standards are mainly based
on XML. Built upon W3C standards, XML based e-
Business standards, such as ebXML and RosettaNet,
provide a good basis for a common syntactical
understanding between trading partners. XML based
e-Business standards are a big step towards B2B
integration and have been quite successful in
providing general and well utilised syntactic
standards. However, they cannot facilitate semantic
integration between business partners as XML can
only cover syntax and not the semantics of the
transactions.
Ontologies, on the other hand, are an appropriate
means of unambiguously capturing the definitions
and interrelationships of concepts in a formal,
unambiguous and machine interpretable manner,
with the aim of a shared understanding of a domain,
which is indeed the ultimate goal of e-Business
standards. Therefore, utilising ontologies seems an
appropriate approach for defining more expressive,
stable and interoperable e-Business standards.
3 E-BUSINESS STANDARDS
AND ONTOLOGIES
A considerable number of publications emphasise on
the importance of semantic web technologies and
ontologies in B2B transactions (Legner, Wende,
2007)(Kajan, Stoimenov, 2005)(Wu, Li & Yang,
2006)(Gong, Ning, Chen, O'Sullivan,
2006)(Höfferer, 2007)(Liegl, Huemer & Zapletal
2009)(Vujasinovic et al., 2010). There are also a
growing number of ontologies developed for e-
Business related standards in the literature.
Examples are oXPDL, an ontology for XPDL
(Haller, Gaaloul & Marmolowski, 2008), an
ontology for WS-BPEL (Nitzsche, Wutke & Van
Lessen, 2007), ebXML Registry Profile for OWL
(OASIS ebXML Registry TC, 2006), which
provides specifications for publishing and
discovering OWL ontologies in the ebXML
Registry/Repository and OntologUBL, which
provides an ontology for Universal Business
Language (The Ontolog Forum, 2002 ).
There are also a few works focusing on utilising
ontologies in conjunction with e-Business standards.
Vujasinovic, Ivezic, Kulvatunyou, Barkmeyer,
Missikof, Marjanovic and Miletic (2010) provide a
semantic mediation architecture for standard based
B2B interoperability. This work emphasises the
importance of Standard Development Organisations
in achieving standard based semantic B2B
integration and thus highlights the importance of
ontologies in relation with e-Business standards.
OASIS may be considered as the first Standard
Development Organisation to address ontologies and
semantic web technologies and their synergy with
standards. The first ontology related initiative in
OASIS is the Semantic Support for Electronic
Business Document Interoperability Technical
Committee (OASIS SET TC, 2009), which aims at
developing specifications for machine processable
semantic content of the Electronic Business
Documents based on the UN/CEFACT Core
Components Technical Specification (CCTS).
Another relevant TC in OASIS, which may be
considered as the first official ontology based
standard Technical Committee, is called OASIS
Quantities and Units of Measure Ontology Standard
(QUOMOS) Technical Committee (OASIS
QUOMOS TC, 2010). Ontolog forum (The Ontolog
Community, 2010) is another relevant initiative
which addresses the importance of ontologies for
standard community and therefore had ‘Toward
Ontology-based Standards’ as their 2009 ontology
summit theme. In fact OASIS QUOMOS was the
result of discussions in the ontolog forum, which
ended up as an OASIS TC. These efforts emphasise
on the significance of ontologies and semantic web
technologies in the standards world and imply that it
is time for the intersection of these two
communities.
Nevertheless, almost no effort has yet been taken
to utilising ontologies for developing, authoring or
TOWARDS ONTOLOGY BASED E-BUSINESS STANDARDS
171

improving e-Business standards. It is believed that
this is an important gap, which needs to be explored
extensively.
4 ONTOLOGY BASED
E-BUSINESS STANDARDS
Ontologies have the potential to facilitate both the
creation and utilisation of standards (The Ontolog
Community, 2010). They may also be used to
improve the quality of standards, leading to more
robust implementations as well as the semantic
integration of different standards.
Ontologies may contribute to the development,
extension and improvement of e-Business standards
specifications in the following ways:
1. Formalise concepts within existing e-Business
standards, such as ebXML and RosettaNet. This
would result in a more stable definition of semantics
in the standard and allow the writing expressions
based on clear, unambiguous terms and categories.
In this approach, specifications serve as a foundation
for developed ontologies and therefore the
ontologies can be evaluated against the standards
specifications and their XML Schemas. (The
Ontolog Community, 2010)
2. Reengineering of existing standards based on
ontological analysis, identifying their potential
problems and semantic ambiguities and improving
them. (The Ontolog Community, 2010)
3. Facilitate integration between different
standards, which are already defined using
ontologies.
4. Development of standards, wherein ontologies
are used throughout the standard development
phases, from start to finish, realising the benefits of
the semantic vision outlined in Section 1. This
approach can be taken where appropriate in
developing new e-Business standards or new
versions of existing standards.
The latest of the above is the proposition of this
paper and will be further discussed in the remainder
of the paper.
In order to study the domain under discussion,
two approaches have been adopted: top down and
bottom up. The top down approach is done in
collaboration with standards developers and experts
in the field of standardisation and also taking into
account various relevant specifications. The purpose
of this approach is to formalise the structure of e-
Business standards in a robust and unambiguous
way. The output of this approach is an ontology for
e-Business standards, which represents the building
blocks of standards and their relationships in general
and e-Business standards in particular. This ontology
may further be utilised as a basis for developing
ontology based e-Business standards and possibly
other information systems related standards.
The Bottom up approach is taken as an
experiment for developing an ontology for a specific
e-Business standard, OASIS ebXML Business
Process Specification Schema (ebBP). The purpose
of the bottom up approach is to explore the
requirement of an e-Business standard, in particular,
and challenges associated with that. The result of the
bottom up approach can also be used to reflect on
the top down approach and its resulting ontology.
While conducting the top down approach, a
methodology comprising nine steps was developed.
Steps 1 to 4 have already been taken and steps 5 to 9
are to be done in the future. The steps are as follows:
Step 1. Brainstorming for developing a domain
model.
Step 2. Turning the model into a concrete
ontology.
Step 3. Identifying those parts of the model
related to the artefacts which are wished to be
standardise.
Step 4. Adding related properties to flesh out
those parts of the ontology identified in step 3.
Figure 2 depicts a snapshot of the ontology
resulting from the methodology up to step 4. It is
important to note that this ontology is a work in
progress and is solely provided as an introduction of
the domain under study. Furthermore, figure 2
depicts a part of the ontology and doesn’t include all
classes and properties of the ontology.
Steps 5 to 9 will be addressed in future to enhance
the ontology are as follows:
Step 5. Add rules to turn the parts of the ontology
identified in step 3 into artefacts such as mark-up
wished to be standardise.
Step 6. Express the above rules as subject and
predicate with identifiers.
Step 7. Use the aforementioned rules to generate
the artefacts needed, such as a schema for a mark-up
representation of the ontological model.
Step 8. Add test assertions based on the model in
step 4 and statements in step 6.
Step 9. Publish the ontology including the model
and its representational artefacts, possibly in
separate specifications for modularity.
For the bottom up approach an ontology for ebBP is
developed. Figure 3 presents a snapshot of a set of
classes in the ebBP ontology.
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172

Figure 2: e-Business Specifications Ontology.
Figure 3: ebXML Business Process Specification Schema
Ontology.
In combining the two approaches it seems that there
is not a clear correspondence between the classes in
the e-Business Specifications ontology and the ebBP
ontology. These ambiguities imply that future work
is needed in harmonising these two levels on
standard ontologies.
This paper suggests that ontologies can be used
for defining new e-Business specifications or new
version of existing standards in various extents,
including their conformance clause, test assertions
and normative statements. They can also be used for
conformance checking of the implementations of
standards. To achieve this however, a consistent
standard development methodology, which utilises
ontologies in the whole standard development
process, is required.
Using these ontologies in this way, a basis for
specifying standards is provided. All or part of a
standard may thus be developed from beginning to
end making full use of ontologies and also domain-
specific ontologies to achieve the benefits of reduced
ambiguity and vagueness and to allow the
development of complex and dynamic standards
with context-dependant rules.
5 CHALLENGES AND FUTURE
RESEARCH
5.1 Challenges
There remains the need for the standards technical
committee or working group to consider how the use
of ontologies as a basis for their specifications
affects the implementers and, in some cases, even
the end users of their standard. It may be that XML
Schema files or other artefacts are to be generated
using specialised tools from the ontologies and that
such a schema is to define an XML instance for use
in a particular context, as specified in context-
specific information in the ontologies. It might be
necessary to deduce certain requirements by the
introduction of values for variables included in the
ontologies, normative statements or test assertions;
values not known until this stage but accounted for
TOWARDS ONTOLOGY BASED E-BUSINESS STANDARDS
173

in the standard. These techniques allow for greater
flexibility and wider scope in defining a standard for
implementation in a variety of situations. In some
cases it may be expected that implementations or
end user software will include knowledge bases and
other ontology-aware technologies to make full use
of the ontology basis of the standard. Test cases may
be stored and retrieved dynamically from a database
or repository according to results obtained running
previous tests and according to complex rules based
on ontology-based test assertions.
Challenges abound as the benefits do not offer
themselves without a struggle. The obvious but often
neglected challenge is to provide change
management and version control facilities both for
the standard and for the implementations of the
standard.
Nevertheless, despite the complexities and
stringent requirements on both standard developer
and standard implementer, ontologies are becoming
more and more a common sight in standards
committees as their benefits are recognised for their
potential to improve quality or implementation and
interoperability.
5.2 Next Steps and Research Questions
As mentioned in section 4, the top down ontology
provided in this paper is a works in progress, which
needs to be extended and fully tested in different
cases and in relation with different standards. In the
next steps of these research steps 5 to 9 explained in
section 4 will be taken to complete the e-Business
standards ontology. The plan is to test the resulting
ontology with a number of ontologies for ebXML
standards, which will be defined using the bottom up
approach, and explore the outcome of the test.
When considering utilising ontologies as a basis
for e-Business standard development a number of
research question require consideration:
- How normative statements can be defined
using an ontology based e-Business standard?
- How test assertions can be addressed in an
ontology based e-Business standard?
- How conformance clauses can be defined and
represented in the ontology based e-Business
standards and how they can be queried for
conformance checking of a specific
implementation?
- How existing standards can be included in the
ontology based framework?
- How different versions of a standard can be
managed using this approach?
- How to relate a model to its representations
and how to relate the representation ontology
classes to external representation definitions
such as those in a schema?
6 CONCLUSIONS
This paper proposes a novel approach in developing
e-Business standards and suggests that ontologies
should be used in the process of e-Business
standards development in order to fully realise the
semantic e-Business vision. To explore this idea a
current state of the art is provided followed by a
combined top down and bottom up approach
adopted to develop an ontology for e-Business
standards in general and an ontology for a specific e-
Business standard, respectively. Analysing the state
of the art and comparison between top down and
bottom up approaches suggest that more research is
required in this field and therefore the paper is
concluded with a research agenda and relevant
research questions to be addressed in the future. To
conclude, it is argued that development of standards,
which are based on ontologies, would enhance their
stability and usability, as well as facilitating standard
based integration and interoperation in value chains.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The research leading to the work as published in this
paper has been sponsored in part by Fujitsu
Laboratories of Europe Limited.
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