Interactive Interfaces for Mapping E-commerce Ontologies

XML is a metalanguage that allows a company of any size to create its own markup languages that describe its business domain in a way that is most suit­able and convenient for the company. This is one of the main advantages of using XML — it can provide a company with its own domain-specific language, a highly specialized set of tags (metadata labels) also called a vocabulary. The problem arises when two companies start to communicate with each other using their own XML-based languages. Because the languages use vocabularies that are partly or even completely different, it is impossible for computers to translate automatically from one language into another. One of the aims of the Semantic Web is to enable such translation requiring no human intervention. But before the new generation of the Web reaches that stage of maturity, there is a need for some simple but effective techniques to establish XML-based communication between companies.