New trends on e-Procurement applying semantic technologies: Current status and future challenges Articles uri icon

publication date

  • June 2014

start page

  • 800

end page

  • 820

issue

  • 5

volume

  • 65

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 0166-3615

Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)

  • 1872-6194

abstract

  • The present paper introduces and reviews existing technology and research works in the field of e-Procurement. More specifically this survey aims to collect those relevant approaches that have tackled the challenge of delivering more advanced and intelligent e-Procurement management systems due to its relevance in the industry to afford more timely, adaptable and flexible decisions in purchasing processes. Although existing tools and techniques have demonstrated their ability to manage e-Procurement processes as a part of a supply management system there is a lack of interoperability among tools, tangled dependencies between processes or difficulties to exploit existing data and information to name a few that are preventing a proper use of the new dynamic and data-based environment. On the other hand semantic-based technologies emerge to provide the adequate building blocks to represent domain-knowledge and elevate the meaning of information resources through a common and shared data model (RDF) with a formal query language (SPARQL) and accessible via the Internet Protocols. In this sense the Linked Data effort has gained momentum to apply the principles of the aforementioned initiative to boost the re-use of information and data across different tools and processes. That is why authors review both existing open issues in the context e-Procurement with special focus on public procurement and semantic-based approaches to address them. To do so a preliminary research study is conducted to assess the state of the art in the context of e-Procurement and semantic-based systems. Afterwards main drawbacks of existing e-Procurement systems are presented to narrow down in semantic-based approaches applied to this field. Once the current status in both areas is reviewed, authors purpose the use and creation of an e-Procurement index to evaluate the quality of service of procurement systems.

keywords

  • e-procurement; semantics; interoperability; supply chain; public procurement; linked data; e-commerce; categorization standards; web; ontology; services; system; recommendations; architecture; platforms