On development of supplier segmentation ontology using latent semantic analysis for supplier knowledge management in supply chain

The trio emerging technology-cloud computing, semantic web and multi-agent systems - has been pivotal in catalyzing the paradigm shift in Information Technology (IT). Despite Enterprise Resource Planning, Supplier Relationship Management systems, and other solutions; current IT systems are unable to extract and share knowledge from text on the web without human intervention. This has made the restructuring of information sharing technique over the supply chain network to be imperative. We have addressed this problem by developing Supplier Segmentation Ontology. We have extracted knowledge from literature on Behavioral Operations in supply chain (from 1934 to 2013) using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to build classes, subclasses and properties of this Ontology. Approximately 11000 articles (title and abstract) from a list of reputed journals (from IEEEXplore, science direct, and web of knowledge) are considered in LSA. The future scope is to develop Semantic web to enhance supplier knowledge in a supply chain.