Abstract
Product configuration is a key technology in todayâs highly specialized economy. Within the scope of state-of-the-art B2B frameworks and eProcurement solutions, various initiatives take into account the provision of configuration services. However, they all are based on the idea of defining quasi-standards for many-to-many relationships between customers and vendors. When moving towards networked markets, where suppliers dynamically form supply-side consortia, more flexible approaches to B2B integration become necessary. The emerging paradigm of Web services has therefore a huge potential in business application integration. This paper presents an application scenario for configuration Web services, that is currently under development in the research project CAWICOMS1. An ontology-based approach allows the advertisement of services and a configuration specific protocol defines the operational processes. However, the lack of standards for the semantic annotation of Web services is still a major shortcoming of current Web technology.
CAWICOMS is the acronym for âCustomer-Adaptive Web Interface for the Configuration of Products and Services with Multiple Suppliersâ. This work was partly funded by the EC through the IST Programme under contract IST-1999-10688 (http://www.cawicoms.org).
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Felfernig, A., Friedrich, G., Jannach, D., Zanker, M. (2002). Semantic Configuration Web Services in the CAWICOMS Project. In: Horrocks, I., Hendler, J. (eds) The Semantic Web â ISWC 2002. ISWC 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2342. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48005-6_16
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