| Over the past twenty years, as a new management model, the supply chain management has been recognized and applied all over the world. People gradually realize that nowadays it's almost impossible for a company to control every aspect of production from the raw material to the final sell. But in every aspect, there are some companies with the core competitive power. They focus to strengthen their core competence by using all the resources, and expand their power through the combined horizontal and vertical. The supply chain management involves a lot of companies in different areas and different industries, the information sharing is the foundation of the supply chain management, and the knowledge has become the decisive factor in their survival.The biggest obstacle of information sharing among supply chain companies is the conflicts of data formats and semantic heterogeneity in the system. Although there are many advantages to use the multi-agent system, it is extremely complicated to interoperate among different agents. For different agents have different understandings of their environment and the concept, as well as their target and ability, so how to deal with the inconsistency of conceptual understanding and Interoperate on the semantic level is becoming a difficulty. eCl@ss is a hierarchical system for grouping materials, products and services according to a logical structure with a level detail that corresponds to the product-specific properties that can be described using norm-conforming properties. It runs through the entire process in the supply chain and put forward a classification standard to describe the products and services. T Berners-Lee presents the concept of semantic web which makes a great idea to support the information sharing in the semantic level. What's more, as the core concept in the field of semantic web, the ontology provides a clear,formal and standardized description of a shared concept, which makes a solid foundation to carry out the semantic operations and semantic data exchanges.It studies the supply chain management and its characteristics, analyze the root causes of information sharing inefficiency in the supply chain systems and point out the inconsistencies in the conceptual understanding and the lack of semantic interoperate. We believe that the ontology is the critical technology to realize the semantic Interoperability among different companies. At the same time, we use the eCl@ss standard to achieve the common understanding of the concept of knowledge and information by all supply chain companies. Finally, we make an example of car industry to establish a simple public OWL ontology which is based in eCl@ss, to describe detailed how to make use of the ontology's strong expression of semantic relations and reasoning and to realize the integration of knowledge and information sharing and interoperability among different companies in the supply chain management. |
