Standard International Trade Classification: From Spreadsheet to OWL-2 Ontology

Abstract

Trade classifications are a necessary prerequisite for the compilation of trade statistics, and they should – beyond that – be regarded as a valuable base for the definition of shared controlled vocabularies for linked business data that deal with import, export etc. The Standard International Trade Classification (SITC) provided by the UN Statistics Division is a widely used classification mostly applied for scientific and analytical purposes. SITC – as most other trade classifications – is available today only in text or spreadsheet formats. These formats reveal the inner hierarchical structure of SITC to the human reader, because SITC trade codes are built according to the decimal classification scheme, but unfortunately, SITC’s inner structure is opaque to computer applications in text and spreadsheet formats. The paper discusses an approach to set up an OWL-2 ontology for SITC that states subsumption relations between classes of goods. This kind of semantic underpinning of SITC is suited to ease both checking and extending SITC and to derive from it a shared controlled vocabulary for business linked data. Some problems of today’s SITC (among them missing inner nodes of the trade code hierarchy) are carefully discussed, and the paper motivates several decisions that were taken for ontology design. Finally, the study introduces the semantic reasoner as a tool for the (at least partial) automatic derivation of structural information for SITC from the trade code building rule. The paper reports on reasoner runtimes observed for different versions of the SITC ontology and for different versions of the Pellet reasoner.

Full text

RESEARCH PAPER
Standard International Trade Classification
From Spreadsheet to OWL-2 Ontology
Norbert Luttenberger •Jesper Zedlitz
Received: 19 December 2016 / Accepted: 10 April 2017 / Published online: 1 September 2017
Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH 2017
Abstract Trade classifications are a necessary prerequisite
for the compilation of trade statistics, and they should –
beyond that – be regarded as a valuable base for the defi-
nition of shared controlled vocabularies for linked business
data that deal with import, export etc. The Standard
International Trade Classification (SITC) provided by the
UN Statistics Division is a widely used classification
mostly applied for scientific and analytical purposes. SITC
– as most other trade classifications – is available today
only in text or spreadsheet formats. These formats reveal
the inner hierarchical structure of SITC to the human
reader, because SITC trade codes are built according to the
decimal classification scheme, but unfortunately, SITC’s
inner structure is opaque to computer applications in text
and spreadsheet formats. The paper discusses an approach
to set up an OWL-2 ontology for SITC that states sub-
sumption relations between classes of goods. This kind of
semantic underpinning of SITC is suited to ease both
checking and extending SITC and to derive from it a shared
controlled vocabulary for business linked data. Some
problems of today’s SITC (among them missing inner
nodes of the trade code hierarchy) are carefully discussed,
and the paper motivates several decisions that were taken
for ontology design. Finally, the study introduces the
semantic reasoner as a tool for the (at least partial)
automatic derivation of structural information for SITC
from the trade code building rule. The paper reports on
reasoner runtimes observed for different versions of the
SITC ontology and for different versions of the Pellet
reasoner.
Keywords Trade classification Semantic reasoning
1 Introduction
Trade classifications are a necessary prerequisite for the
preparation of trade statistics that are used to describe – for
administrative and/or scientific purposes – domestic and
international flows of goods. Without challenging this
intended use, we discuss trade classifications in this paper
with a different motivation: We argue that trade classifi-
cations – beyond their obvious purpose – can also be
considered as valuable sources for the definition of shared
controlled vocabularies. Shared controlled vocabularies are
at the foundation of Linked (Open) Data collections. With
this perspective in mind, we argue that the terminology
work that is required for the provision of meaningful linked
business data can profit from existing vocabularies, among
them those that give trade statistics their shape.
Unfortunately, most trade classifications today are
available in text or table (spreadsheet) formats. These
formats address the human reader; they are not well suited
to reveal the inner, mostly hierarchical structure of trade
classifications to computer processing and examination.
Experience has shown that with this kind of formats
structural problems may arise on several occasions, for
instance when adjusting a trade classification to new
demands. To avoid these problems, we therefore prefer a
logics-based format for the development of shared
Accepted after 2 revisions by Prof. Dr. Abramowicz.
Prof. Dr. N. Luttenberger (&)Dr. J. Zedlitz
Research Group for Communication Systems, Department of
Computer Science, Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel, Kiel,
Germany
e-mail: n.luttenberger@email.uni-kiel.de
Dr. J. Zedlitz
e-mail: j.zedlitz@email.uni-kiel.de
123
Bus Inf Syst Eng 60(4):305–316 (2018)
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-017-0495-z
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