Ontology-Based Coordination and Implementation for Garment Supply Chain Management

This paper proposes an ontology-based coordination framework for information interoperation in Garment Supply Chain Management (GSCM) system. To achieve semantic interoperability in heterogeneous enterprise information systems, ontologies have been widely used. Mapping among multiple ontologies is necessary for an across-enterprises supply chain. In Garment Supply Chain Management, it highly demands semantic interoperability to bridge heterogeneous enterprise applications at various domains into an integrative system. In this paper, we elaborate application ontologies and their mapping logic in GSCM, and discuss how to use Object-Oriented technologies, such as UML, to define application ontology and describe ontology coordination logic. We also discuss how to design and implement the coordination framework to solving the semantic interoperability for garment industry supply chain information system. Although ontology has been widely applied in knowledge engineering systems of GIS Platforms, Medical Information Systems and Workflow Management Systems, it is still novel for discussing the semantic information interoperability with Garment Supply Chain background.