Product Classification Integration for E-Commerce

A marketplace is the place where the demand and supply of buyers and vendors participating in a business process may meet. Therefore, electronic marketplaces are virtual communities in which buyers may meet proposals of several suppliers and make the best choice. In the electronic commerce world, the comparison between different products is blocked due to the lack of standards (on the contrary, the proliferation of standards) describing and classifying them. Therefore, the need for B2B and B2C marketplaces is to reclassify products and goods according to different standardization models. This paper aims to face this problem by suggesting the use of a semi-automatic methodology to define a mapping among different e-commerce product classification standards. This methodology is an extension of the MOMIS-system, a mediator system developed within the Intelligent Integration of Information research area.