Interoperability in Logistics: An Ontology Alignment Approach

The logistics sector consists of a limited number of large enterprises and many Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). These enterprises either have developed proprietary information systems or use Commercial of the Shelve (COTS) systems tailored to their business processes. It is a large number of heterogeneous systems interoperable via a large variety of (subsets of) open -,or proprietary standards. These standards typically reflect the same data sets in distinct ways so that there is a large variation of non-interoperable solutions. As a result, interoperability of information systems of different enterprises takes a lot of development and configuration time leading to high costs, with or without using an intermediate system for data transformations. (Semi-)automatic ontology alignment may solve this issue and support organizations in creating interoperable solutions. This paper presents experiments on applying ontology alignment to logistics.