Business Maps Topic Maps Go B2B

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Business MapsTopic Maps Go B2B!

• Marc de Graauw
• XML Europe 2002, May 23

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1. B2B Interoperability 2. Current Solutions to
Interoperability3. Problems with Current
Solutions 4. The Mapping Model 5. Business Maps
- a Proposed Solution6. Conclusions
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B2B Interoperability - the problem

• Abundance of vocabularies
• xCBL, FinXML, FpML, ebXML, X.12, EDIFACT,
  legacy, in-house, proprietary
• Business partners use different vocabularies
• No quick solution
• Interoperability is a HUGE problem

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Type and token

• token items
• ltamount currencyUSDgt200.00lt/amountgt
• USD20000
• type items
• amount is the total amount due ex. VAT
• amount is in USD, EUR, JPY or IDR
• amount has a maximum of two decimals

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Type and token

• this paper is about type-to-type mappings
• linguistics type - token
• IT class - instance
• mathematics set - element

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Type and token

• IT / mathematics enumerable set (class) of
  elements (instances)
• natural language type / token does not
  presuppose enumerability
• compare 1, 2, 3 with love
• clash of cultures
• computers use class / instance
• data definitions use natural language

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What is money?

• For me Euro
• Was for me Dutch guilder
• For you maybe dollar, yen, pound
• Historian ducats, sestertii
• Anthropologist shells, beads
• Economist M0, M1, M2, M3, M4
• Accountant VAT, taxes, EBITDA?

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1. B2B Interoperability 2. Current Solutions to
Interoperability3. Problems with Current
Solutions 4. The Mapping Model 5. Business Maps
- a Proposed Solution6. Conclusions
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1. The naive approach

• Make a new vocabulary
• Make it real real real good!
• Make everybody use it!!!
• ...multiple vocabularies are a fact of life

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2. Adding meta-information

• ebXML Core Components

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2. Adding meta-information

• Assemble Core Components in Business Document
• Core Components dont have semantics
• Use Context Rules to add information
• Region, Industry, Business Process, Product,
  Official Constraints, Role, Temporal, Information
  Structural Context, Application Processing,
  Service Level, Business Purpose, Virtual
  Marketplace, Contractual

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3. Public libraries of unique IDs

• Use Published Subject Identifiers
• Informal example
• Topic 'United States of America' PSI US
• Topic 'Verenigde Staten van America' PSI US

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PSIs
mao
lenin
stalin
PSIs
topics
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov
Stalin
Joseph V. Stalin
Mao Ze Dong
Vladimir Ilich Lenin
Lenin
Mao Tse Tung
Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili
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3. Public libraries of unique IDs

• Good solution if
• problem space with clearly delimited entities
• widely accepted public library
• ISO country codes, currency codes
• Social Security Numbers
• ZIP codes

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4. Automatic Mapping
(design time)
biz document type 1
biz document type 2
mapping
generate
biz document token A (of type 1)
biz document token B (of type 2)
mapping
(run time)
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4. Automatic Mapping

• formal semantic notation for
• type documents
• type items
• type-to-type mappings
• complete (all relevant information from natural
  language is retained)
• precise (only information which comes from
  natural language definitions)

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1. B2B Interoperability 2. Current Solutions to
Interoperability3. Problems with Current
Solutions 4. The Mapping Model 5. Business Maps
- a Proposed Solution6. Conclusions
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Trading Partner 1 CustomerAdress
Trading Partner 2 invoice_adress
Sales DB
Invoice DB
aaaa, bbbb, cccc pppp, qqqq, rrrr xxxx, yyyy, zzzz
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True Equivalence?

• When our partner does our billing
• CustomerAdress ? invoice_adress
• Not
• CustomerAdress invoice_adress
• That implies
• CustomerAdress ? invoice_adress
• We often dont establish equivalence but
  subclass/superclass relations

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Problems

• PSIs dont work without true equivalence
• Automatic mapping is still in the lab
• Context-based automatic mapping needs complete
  information
• In reality there is often only partial
  information

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What to do ?

• Do we need new mappings between every two
  ontologies for every business process?
• No knowledge in mappings is reusable - by human
  B2B analysts
• So we need to capture the knowledge in mappings
  for reuse

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1. B2B Interoperability 2. Current Solutions to
Interoperability3. Problems with Current
Solutions 4. The Mapping Model 5. Business Maps
- a Proposed Solution6. Conclusions
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Trading Partner 1
Trading Partner 2
Sales DB
Invoice DB
billing
Invoice Mapping
CustomerName ? company_name CustomerAdress ?
invoice_adress TotalSales ? amount_due
Mailing DB
Sales DB
mailings
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The Mapping Model

• token-to-token mappings
• XSLT
• programming language
• natural language
• type-to-type mappings
• no standard
• (structured natural language)

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Sample type-to-type mapping(xCBL 3.5 to X12)
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1. B2B Interoperability 2. Current Solutions to
Interoperability3. Problems with Current
Solutions 4. The Mapping Model 5. Business Maps
- a Proposed Solution6. Conclusions
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Business Maps

• Keep data definitions external
• no redundancy
• external format is irrelevant (UML, TM, RDF,
  plain text, proprietary tools)
• Topic Maps fit Mapping Model nicely
• Topic Maps can provide portable, reusable
  mappings
• Merging facilitates reusability

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(No Transcript)
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Position of mappings
Vocabularies
itm.xtm
context.xtm
Bizwords!
bizwords.xtm
GBL
gbl.xtm
businessmap1.xtm
businessmap2.xtm
inhouse
data dictionary
dd.xtm
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Topic types

• document
• a business document, i.e. "Order"
• item
• an item in a document, i.e. "order date"
• domain
• a data type, i.e. "date"

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Occurrence types

• definition
• a data definition as stored in a vocabulary
• datatype
• a definition of a data type as stored in a
  vocabulary

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Association types

• composition
• a document is composed of items, i.e. "Order" is
  composed of "order date", "adress" et cetera
• document_mapping
• a document maps onto another, i.e. "Order" maps
  onto "Purchase Order"

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Association types

• item_mapping
• an item maps onto another item, i.e. "order date"
  maps onto "purchase order date"
• unidirectional
• one-way item mapping, the reverse mapping is not
  allowed
• to_yyyymmdd
• date conversion to YYYYMMDD format

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Role types

• A composition has roles
• containing-document, optional-item, required-item
• An item_mapping has roles
• source_item, destination_item
• An document_mapping has roles
• source_document, destination_document

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1. B2B Interoperability 2. Current Solutions to
Interoperability3. Problems with Current
Solutions 4. The Mapping Model 5. Business Maps
- a Proposed Solution6. Conclusions
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Conclusions

• In B2B mapping, we often only have partial
  information
• We need to capture the knowledge in mappings for
  reuse
• Topic Maps provide an excellent vehicle to make
  such Business Maps

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• www.marcdegraauw.com/itm