Open Access

Nathali Ortiz Suarez, Jens Lemcke, Ulrike Pado

• Enterprises express the concepts of their electronic business-to-business (B2B) communication in individual ontology-like schemas. Collaborations require merging schemas’ common concepts into Business Entities (BEs) in a Canonical Data Model (CDM). Although consistent, automatic schema merging is state of the art, the task of labeling the BEs with descriptive, yet short and unique names, remains. Our approach first derives a heuristically ranked list of candidate labels for each BE locally from the names and descriptions of the underlying concepts. Second, we use constraint satisfaction to assign a semantically unique name to each BE that optimally distinguishes it from the other BEs. Our system’s labels outperform previous work in their description of BE content and in their discrimination between similar BEs. In a task-based evaluation, business experts estimate that our approach can save about 12% of B2B integration effort compared to previous work and about 49% in total.