A Framework for Building Information Translators

Not Available Today's manufacturing companies are concentrating their energy towards breaking the barriers between firms all along the supply chain to create a virtual enterprise whose goal is to operate as if the chain was a single entity. Breaking these barriers involves facilitating collaboration and communication at all levels of the enterprise. A key roadblock to this sort of facilitation is the need for a computer system interoperability that enables manufacturers and product suppliers to move and share information up and down the supply chain. In this project, we propose to implement a framework for developing and maintaining an information translator for the entire supply chain. The translators generated by the framework will not only enable the exchange of properly formatted data, but will take into account the meaning of data during the translation. The key innovations of this project are: (1) the use of ontologies to enable information translation, (2) foundations for ontology harmonization, (3) semantic translation through inferences, and (4) automated generation and management of translators. The technology developed in this project will enable companies to cost- and time-effectively integrate their ERP and ERM systems with their suppliers' stand-alone software applications.