A data integration framework for e-commerce product classification

A marketplace is the place in which the demand and supply of buyers and vendors participating in a business process may meet. Therefore, electronic marketplaces are virtual communities in which buyers may meet proposals of several suppliers and make the best choice. In the electronic commerce world, the comparison between different products is blocked due to the lack of standards (on the contrary, the proliferation of standards) describing and classifying them. Therefore, the need for B2B and B2C marketplaces is to reclassify products and goods according to different standardization models. This paper aims to face this problem by suggesting the use of a semi-automatic methodology, supported by a tool (SI-Designer), to define the mapping among different e-commerce product classification standards. This methodology was developed for the MOMIS system within the Intelligent Integration of Information research area. We describe our extension to the methodology that makes it applyable in general to product classification standard, by selecting a fragment of ECCMA/UNSPSC and ecl @ss standard.