A framework for sharing product information across enterprises

Collaborative product commerce (CPC) is a newly emerging technology to support inter-enterprise collaboration through the product life-cycle. From the point of view of information technology, CPC is a software technology to integrate products, processes and resources of different enterprises using web technologies. In this paper, we propose a framework for integrating product information across enterprises, which is being developed by the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) as a part of a CPC project. The product metadata represented by an XML schema, which is compatible with the ISO STEP PDM (product Data Management) schema standard, is presented to semantically and schematically integrate distributed product information. Web services technologies are discussed to support the interoperability of application systems related to the product development, such as computer-aided design (CAD) and PDM, where most of these applications run in a distributed environment. Finally, we implement the framework to integrate distributed product information and application systems.