A B2B Marketplace eCommerce Platform Approach Integrating Purchasing and Transport Processes

Abstract. Business-to-business (B2B) marketplace eCommerce platforms have grown in number in the last years. While these platforms allow product/service discovery and purchasing, they are limited in terms of integrating transport pro-cesses via well-defined B2B interactions. We approach this problem from an ho-listic view by dividing it into four sub-problems: enriching product and service descriptions with adequate semantic annotations for smooth discovery; integra-tion of product classification taxonomies and standardized supply chain data rep-resentations; integration between purchasing and transport processes at proce-dural and data model levels; and disconnection between eCommerce platforms and legacy information systems of platform users. In this paper, we proposed a solution for each of these problems and presented a unified approach to integrate purchasing and transport phases in B2B marketplace eCommerce platforms. Fi-nally, we validated the proposed approach with a case study in the scope of the NIMBLE research project including integration of eClass and Furniture Sector Taxonomy classification taxonomies into NIMBLE, semantic annotation of prod-ucts with the information embedded in those taxonomies and a B2B scenario covering purchasing and transport phases of a traditional supply chain.