Mapping between heterogeneous XML and OWL transaction representations in B2B integration

XML-based standards have been widely used to enable and ease Business-to-Business (B2B) integration. Examples of standards include cXML, CIDX and ebXML. While these XML-based standards are syntactic, contemporary organizations have available new means to structure their internal data representations using semantic descriptions, such as RDF(S) and OWL. This scenario poses an interesting challenge: “How to reconcile external XML-based standards and internal OWL-based representations in B2B integration scenarios?” In this paper, we present a conceptual approach, and its implementation, to integrate external syntactic data representations with organizational internal semantic data representations by using the notion of heterogeneous mappings which are established between the two types of representations. The application developed, B2BISS, enables an effective management of mappings. As the number of mappings stored in the repository increases over time, organizations can gradually rely on a semi-automatic to automatic B2B integration.