Defining and Managing Semantics and Datatypes – Is there a role for ISO Topic Maps? Martin Bryan Technical Manager The Diffuse Project

About The Diffuse Project  5th framework accompanying measure  Provides a single source for information relating to Information Society standardization initiatives  Provides guides on the role standards can play in business, particularly within R&D projects  Seeks to identify interaction between IST projects and IS standardization

The Diffuse Standards List

CEN/ISSS EC Workshop  CEN's Information Society Standardization System's Electronic Commerce Workshop provides a forum for the discussion of cross-industry issues relating to the use of IST for business messaging  Extends work previously done under the aegis of the European Board for EDI Standardization (EBES)

EC Workshop working groups  XML/EDI (now a separate workshop)  Electronic Commerce Architectures  Preparing overview of existing architectures  Looking at what overall requirements are  Defining and Managing Semantics and Datatypes for Electronic Commerce  Produced CEN Workshop Agreement on Datatyping for Electronic Data Interchange

Role of DAMSAD-EC  Identifying requirements for semantics management within electronic commerce  Monitoring the work of the ebXML initiative's Core Components group  Based on UN/EDIFACT semantics  Expressed using XML syntax  Identifying relationships between relevant initiatives, including ISO BSR, ANSI X.12, UN/EDIFACT and ebXML

ISO/IEC 13250: Topic Maps  Published January 2000  Based on SGML Architectural Forms  ISO 8879: 1986 Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)  ISO 10744:1997 Hypermedia/Time-based Structuring Language (HyTime)  Allows multilingual naming of subjects  Allows identification of relationships between subjects

Topic Maps or RDF?  RDF describes the characteristics of a single resource  Topic Maps describe characteristics known to be shared by a set of resources  RDF points a resource to known semantics (à la library catalogue record)  Topic Maps points known semantics to relevant resources (à la subject group)

Why use Topic Maps for EC?  Need multiple names for business objects  To cope with multilinguality  To cope with domain-specific naming  Need to identify relationships between business objects  One record can serve different purposes when used in different contexts  Need to be able to access record using many different criteria

What can IST do to help?  By identifying the type of relationships that are commonly found to occur between business process  By identifying a multilingual set of names for a business process used within the European single market  By identifying industry specific names for business processes and for the relationships between processes