An Ontology to Support Context-Aware B2B Services

In present day globalised trade, the ability to support collaboration through B2B (Business-to-Business) services is crucial. One of the key challenges is to pervasively connect partners across the entire value chain, with the appropriate service offerings. Thus, it is vital to quickly identify potential partners to form new B2B collaborations or to support formed collaborations with swift decision making abilities. This paper proposes the use of Description Logic (DL) based reasoning to ensure completeness and decidability in reasoning for context-aware B2B services. A B2B Context Model is realised through a DL-based representation language called OWL (Web Ontology Language). The expressivity of OWL was extended through the SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language), to represent business rules identified in the model. The performance scalability of an ontology-based knowledge base using OWL was then investigated. Results showed that such a knowledge base is not scalable.