1. Asuman Dogac, METU, Turkey Yildiray Kabak, SRDC Ltd.,Turkey
A Brief Introduction to the Semantic Representations of the UN/CEFACT CCTS-based Electronic Business Document Artifacts
Asuman Dogac, METU, Turkey
Yildiray Kabak, SRDC Ltd.,Turkey

2. The Problem Addressed: All CCTS based standards use CCTS differently

3. The Solution Envisaged: Developing Semantic Tools to Semi-Automate the Mappings among Different CCTS based Standards

4. SET TC Objectives revisited
UN/CEFACT CCTS (Core Component Technical Specification) defines the semantics of document artifacts
However, currently this semantics is available only through text-based search mechanisms
SET TC aim is to explicate the semantics of CCTS based business document standards by defining their semantic properties through a formal, machine processable language as an ontology
In this way, it becomes possible to compute a harmonized ontology which gives
The similarities among document schema ontology classes of different document standards through both
The semantic properties they share and
The semantic equivalences established through reasoning

5. The Upper Ontologies
The semantics is explicated at two levels: At the first level, an upper ontology describing the CCTS document content model is specified
Furthermore, at this level, the upper ontologies of the prominent CCTS based standards, namely, GS1 XML, OAGIS 9.1 and UBL are also developed
The various equivalence relationships between the classes of the CCTS upper ontology and the CCTS based document standard ontologies are defined
These relationships are later used to find the similarities among the document artifacts from different document schemas

6. Example: Core Component Data Type semantics
CCTS provides a fixed set of reusable “Core Component Data Types" (CCTs) such as Amount, Identier, or Measure
The Core Component Type semantics is explicated through the “owl: CoreComponentType" class
For each of the 14 CCTs, a corresponding OWL class is created and inserted as the subclass of “owl:CoreComponentType" class

7. Core Component Data Type semantics
<owl:Class rdf:ID="CoreComponentType" />
<owl:Class rdf:ID="Amount.Type">
<rdfs:subClassOf rdf:resource="#CoreComponentType"/>
</owl:Class>
<owl:Class rdf:ID="BinaryObject.Type">
<owl:Class rdf:ID="Code.Type">
<owl:Class rdf:ID="Date.Type">
<owl:Class rdf:ID="DateTime.Type"> …

8. Other Semantic Properties of CCTS Core Components
Context (the “context” semantics is defined at an absolute minimum since UN/CEFACT UCM is working on this subject)
The structure of the core components (BCCs and ASCCs making up ACCs)
The semantics implied by the naming convention used (“Object Class Term” and “Representation Term”)
The semantics implied by the Business Information Entities (based on a Core Component and used in a context)
The semantics implied by the code lists

9. CCTS Upper Ontology

10. The Upper Ontologies
The semantics is explicated at two levels: At the first level, an upper ontology describing the CCTS document content model is specied
Furthermore, at this level, the upper ontologies for the prominent CCTS based standards, namely, GS1 XML, OAGIS 9.1 and UBL are also developed
The various equivalence relationships between the classes of the CCTS upper ontology and the CCTS based document standard ontologies are defined
These relationships are later used to find the similarities among the document artifacts from different document schemas

12. Document Schema Ontologies
At the next level, the semantics of the document schemas in each standard are described based on its upper ontology
The difference between the document schema specific ontology and the upper ontology is that
The upper ontology describes the generic entities in a document content model
Whereas document schema ontologies describe the actual document artifacts as the subclasses of the classes in the upper ontology
The SET XSD-OWL tool converts a CCTS based document schema into OASIS SET TC OWL Definition and is publicly available from

14. SET Harmonized Ontology
When these ontologies are harmonized using a DL reasoner, the computed inferred ontologies reveal the implicit equivalences and subsumtion relationships between the document artifacts
In other words,
The shared semantic properties of the CCTS based document artifacts together with
The implicit relationships inferred, help to identify their similarities

16. Next step… Further explanations related with the Deliverable?
How to use SET Specifications in real life applications?
In the iSURF Project to map supply chain planning documents conforming to different standards to each other
TC Members proposals…

17. Thank you!