![](bg2.png)
In Section 3, we describe our methodology for map-
ping from DTD, XML Schema to OWL that has been
applied to all RosettaNet PIPs. In Section 4, a case
study, the processing of PIP3A4 Request Purchase
Order, will be described in more details. Section 5
concludes the paper and presents some future work.
2 STATE OF THE ART
XML, which identifies data by tagging information,
has been used for defining formats for data exchange
between applications of e-business. xCBL
3
, Roset-
taNet (RosettaNet Program Office, 2011) and ebXML
(Huemer, 2002) have been proposed for the manage-
ment of business documents using XML technolo-
gies. Their goal is to build a common business model
between partners.
ebXML, trying to facilitate e-commerce for all
businesses, provides meta-models describing busi-
ness processes (Kantola and Korhonen, 2002), but
their description are quite general and don’t provide a
specific definition of business processes, thus it can’t
reduce the uncertainty and confusion.
On the other hand, RosettaNet defines processes,
business documents and messaging in details. But it
focusses on a specific segment of the industry e.g. the
supply chain.
But these XML based standards do not deal with
the semantics of information. For this, we not only
need to store document metadata (e.g. author, title,
etc.), but we must also make available to the ma-
chines the most important concepts found in the doc-
ument, the relations between these concepts or that
of other documents, etc. By using semantic models
based on ontologies, companies acquire several bene-
fits such as the ability to perform inference on knowl-
edge bases and the capacity to share domain models
to easily exchange and integrate information (Cardoso
and Bussler, 2011).
Research now focuses on the adoption of seman-
tics for the business domain. Several formal lan-
guages have been proposed: WSMO (Roman et al.,
2005), and OWL-S (W3C Member Submission, a).
These web service languages are still in W3C sub-
mission member stage and are not recommended yet.
(Cardoso and Bussler, 2011) say that these initia-
tives are somewhat limited when transposed to real-
world industries settings and thus may be considered
a penalty.
B2B standards have been the subject of many
studies for adding semantics. (Dogac et al., 2004)
3
XML Common Business Library, http://www.xcbl.org/
presents an extension to ebXML registry with an
OWL ontology but it’s difficult to apply reasoning on
it or to verify its consistency. In spite of the adapta-
tion effort, much work is still to be done especially
on reasoners. (Kotinurmi et al., 2011) proposed an
“ontologically-enhanced RosettaNet” efforts to map
RosettaNet business documents into a Web ontol-
ogy language, allowing business reasoning based on
RosettaNet message exchanges. They dealt with busi-
ness process alignment and ambiguous message defi-
nitions.They demonstrate their solution using WSMO
(Roman et al., 2005) and the properties of WSML
language (W3C Member Submission, b). On other
hand, (Haller et al., 2008) propose a transformation
methodology of RosettaNet PIPs available as XML
Schemas to WSML. Without giving implementation
details, they dealt only with 50 RosettaNet PIPs de-
fined as XML Schemas, but not with those available
as DTD format.
WSML is limited to Web services only and never
passed the W3C member submission stage, while
OWL is a general-purpose ontology language for the
semantic Web as a W3C recommendation (Panziera
et al., 2010). OWL can provide a better interoperabil-
ity, a support for ontology reuse, and the possibility to
exploit several mature matching techniques (Panziera
et al., 2010). An ontology can help identify basic
concepts describing a knowledge domain and define
a common vocabulary for organizing documents.
There have been some ontology based attempts:
eCl@ssOWL
4
ontology based on services classifica-
tion and products description; another important work
was RosettaNet Ontology
5
, an handmade OWL rep-
resentation of PIP3A4 RosettaNet Partner Interface
Processes (PIPs), which lacks many details and re-
lies on properties not defined in the XML represen-
tation like has price n availability line item.
This ontology does not solve the problem of uncer-
tainty and ambiguity. So, corporations using Roset-
taNet must spend more effort to adopt the new terms
defined in the RosettaNet Ontology.
For this reason, it crucial to start from existing
documents based on XML Schemas in order to keep
the same list of concepts and terms defined.
Our approach is based on an automatic mapping
from existing DTD and XML Schema representations
to OWL ontologies using the OWL/XML serializa-
tion. Some approaches similar to ours have been
proposed: Gloze (Battle, 2006), XS2OWL
6
and Re-
4
http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/eclassowl/
5
http://lsdis.cs.uga.edu/projects/meteor-s/wsdl-s/
ontologies/rosetta.owl
6
http://www.music.tuc.gr/projects/sw/xs2owl/
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