@ Supply Chain Management

REA (Resource-Event-Agent) is a semantic model for internet based Supply Chain collaboration developed by Dr. William McCarthy of Michigan State University. In this presentation for the ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA 2000), Dr. McCarthy and Robert Haugen, Logistical Software LLC outline a web-based semantic model for collaboration.
Before I dived into this thing – I asked myself what do these good people mean by using the word semantic in a semantic model for internet based supply chain collaboration? You can look up the definition here

se.man.tic: Spelled Pronunciation[si-man-tik]
– adjective
of, pertaining to, or arising from the different meanings of words or other symbols
Eg: semantic change; semantic confusion.

So in other words, a semantic model is really a language meaning based model. So, what do the authors mean by using the term sematic model?

By “semantic model” we mean a computer software model of real-world supply chain activities. Another term for semantic model from the field of knowledge representation is “ontology”: the set of classes, relationships, and functions in a universe of discourse.

The authors also try to differentiate it from XML in the following way:

We use the term “semantic model” to differentiate from something like XML, the eXtensible Markup Language, which is often touted as the language of the semantic Web. XML is just a format; it has no content. A semantic model describes the content of the semantic Web: that is, what classes of objects, relationships, and functions are involved in supply chain collaboration. The REA semantic model can be expressed in many formats: XML, UML (the Universal Modeling Language), a relational database, and/or an object-oriented programming language. Using XML as the lingua franca, any REA-based system should be able to interoperate with any other REA-based system, because they understand business objects and events in the same way.

The authors also supply an outline of the aims of using the REA semantic model:

1. supply chain collaboration requires a standard semantic model that all trading partners can use;
2. to achieve Tim Berners-Lee’s vision (in other words, so that anybody can do business with anybody anywhere), the model must be a generally-recognized, non-proprietary Internet standard;
3. the model must be broad (covering the whole supply chain) and deep (covering all relevant business activities);
4. REA is the broadest and deepest currently available semantic model for supply chain collaboration;
5. and REA is non-proprietary, in the public domain, open for developing into an Internet standard.

So what should the REA semantic model achieve in practical operational terms?

As a semantic Web, REA can link economic events together across different companies, industries, and nations. The links are activity-to-activity or agent-to-agent or person-to-person, not just company-to-company. This means each individual in a REA supply chain can be linked directly to each other individual.

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