Goodrelations and Semantic Web in managing supply chain at Maximal srl.
Platinum Mine™ is an IT service provided by Maximal that federates information received from many suppliers and automatically builds a new offering into all subscribed websites.
Maximal srl is an Italian (digital native) company that maintains a catalog with more than 20.000 references from many suppliers. References, stock availability and prices change in near real time.Maximal uses Platinum Mine to keep aligned their web sites with its catalog. Maximal also offers Platinum Mine service to business customers.
The main problem addressed by Platinum Mine is "Information Federation". You may call it the "data problem", data integration, "master data", application integration or a few other names - but the problem remains the same: understanding and using data from independently conceived resources together.
Platinum Mine uses goodrelations ontology and other Semantic Web technologies to implement the knowledge base of the whole Maximal offering.
First, the suppliers catalogs are converted in LinkedData using [http://purl.org/goodrelations%5Da set of related ontologies: goodrelations, ITSMO, PTO, Dublin Core. The resulting RDF graphs are imported into a triplestore and automatically cleansed using some customized axioms and rules.
A set of RESTfull software agents written with Business Ontology Toolkit (BOTK) query the triplestore and build data models ready to be imported in websites. Finally, a plugin in the front-end website calls software agents and populates its database. A plugin for Joomla and Virtuemart is available.
The 16Facile website is an example of e-commerce site populated by Platinum Mine service. By the way, 16Facile site itself exposes its offering as goodrelations RDFa Linked Data.
Platinum Mine is developed and maintained by E-Artspace since 2010. Even if Platinum Mine is a legacy service of Maximal, many of the core components of the project are freely available. For instance: goodrelations andITSMO are available under Creative Common License. BOTK is available under GPL license, the SPARQL engine is implemented with ARC2 library, available with GPL or W3C license. The triplestore can be based on MySQL and ARC2 or on other SPARUL compatible triplestore (i.e Open Link Virtuoso).
Enrico Fagnoni(e.fagnoni at e-artspace.com ) - more info here This case study is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license by E-Artspace srl. Platinum Mine is a Trade Mark of Maximal srl.