Title:	SHARED MEANING IN THE ELECTRONIC MARKETPLACE
Author(s):	Janet Aisbett , Guilherme Pires
ISBN:	972-98947-8-7
Editors:	Nitya Karmakar and Pedro Isaías
Year:	2004
Edition:	Single
Type:	Oral Presentation - 20 minutes
First Page:	363
Last Page:	368
Language:	English
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Full Contents:	click to dowload
Paper Abstract:	Impressive cost reductions and benefits such as improved product quality and delivery performance have been reported for firms adopting electronic procurement and participating in electronic marketplaces. The slow adoption of electronic procurement and failures of e-marketplaces have been attributed to a range of factors from unfamiliarity with technology to the weakening of supplier-customer relationships. This paper examines communication as a possible factor in e-marketplace failure. It is far harder to eliminate ambiguity from an e-marketplace catalogue servicing a multinational customer base than it is to eliminate ambiguity from the face to face exchanges involving actual inspection of goods which occurred in a traditional marketplace. Therefore, failure of e-marketplaces may be attributed in part to the difficulty of maintaining the meaning of the information that must be shared amongst a diverse set of sellers and buyers, and which may require exchanges across industry, cultural and national boundaries. This paper presents a method to guide how participants should structure information so as to improve information exchange associated with e-marketplaces. Consistency of meaning across such exchanges relies not only on the ability to translate terminology used in procurement processes and systems. It also requires commonality amongst the structures that underlie the information in catalogues and the databases of the e-marketplace participants. Our method enables detail to be added in a constrained fashion to a master model that carries the shared meaning of the concepts described in the catalogue.
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