Development of an ontology to improve supply chain management in the Australian timber industry

This chapter proposes an ontology using Web ontology language (OWL) for the Australian timber sector that can be used in conjunction with Semantic Web services to provide effective and cheap business-to-business (B2B) communications. From the perspective of the timber industry sector, this study is important because supply chain efficiency is a key component in an organisation's strategy to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Strong improvement in supply chain performance is possible with improved B2B communication, which is used both for building trust and providing real-time marketing data. Traditional methods such as electronic data interchange (EDI), which are used to facilitate B2B communication, have a number of disadvantages such as high implementation and running costs and a rigid and inflexible messaging standard. Information and communications technologies (ICT) have supported the emergence of Web-based EDI which maintains the advantages of the traditional paradigm while negating the disadvantages. This has been further extended by the advent of the Semantic Web which rests on the fundamental idea that Web resources should be annotated with semantic markup that captures information about their meaning and facilitates meaningful machine-to-machine communication.