In the advent of internet and e-business electronic data sharing, the standardization of vocabulary rapidly became an evident priority. However, companies adoption and embracing hasn't been a successful task so far, at least not with the expected adherence. To impose a unique terminology and classification would be a solution. However, those suppliers not adhering to it most probably would be ignored, and this is not a favourable business situation, not permitting for instance an open selection of the supplier.
More recently, the development of ontologies, as the promising technology with capabilities to solve semantic issues, is being focus of important companies and SMEs also. Each company is struggling to develop competencies at this ontological level, but inevitably different perspectives will lead to different final results, and different ontologies about the same business domain is becoming a real scenario. Again, to envisage forcing manufacturers or suppliers adopting specific agreement ontologies, even if it is based on standards, will not work in most of the cases.
Thus, an advantageous solution would be to keep the terminology and classification in use by each one, and adopt a reference ontology representative of the organization in order to be the mediator in the communications between them. The reference ontology in the furniture domain (funStep ontology) was developed by the funStep consortium through the SMART-fm project and is being updated in the INNOVAFUN project
The ontology mapping tool is a translator between one particular enterprise ontology and the reference one. This could be possible after making semantic mappings between the involved ontologies. Ontology mapping is an activity that attempts to relate the vocabulary of two ontologies that share the same domain of discourse. The process of defining mappings between ontologies is not an easy task and requires a human confirmation. The mapping tool intends to help such human interaction, recording it for further usage as semantic translation between business messages exchanged by different stakeholders.
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