Abstract: - The business area requires the presence of Supply Chain services, to respond to the constantly

evolving requirements. Supply chains are dynamic networks that include a continuous flow of processes,

starting with the supplier and ending with the customer. For effective supply chain management, a conceptual

understanding of the knowledge underlying this field is of utmost importance. On the other hand, ontologies are

Received: August 14, 2023. Revised: May 24, 2024. Accepted: July 11, 2024. Published: September 3, 2024.

From the 1960s onwards, business activity has been

inextricably linked to the concept of Logistics [1],

whose role and importance have been expanded and

upgraded considering the development of business

Logistics expands and upgrades and as the demands

for rapid movement of goods to serve consumers are

constantly increasing, the existence of a knowledge

system is also required, [2], [3], which will help

companies to conceptually understand the basic

structural elements of their supply chain, to achieve

morpho-syntactic information contained within each

word can be encoded with great precision with the

help of ontologies, and, as a result, this method of

representing terminological knowledge can

contribute to meeting the modern requirements for

services of intelligent modeling, analysis and use of

online information [8], especially in the area of the

SC, where there is an absence of conceptual

schemes.

and information with possible applications in

various fields (linguistic and cross-linguistic

research, educational applications, interconnection

with other dictionaries and their enrichment, use for

improving search engines, etc.) and choose as its

basic domain the description of concepts related to

the field of industry, where, while the development

of ontological schemas was almost non-existent

during the previous decade [9], the last years (2022-

2023) have seen significant efforts to solve the

taxonomies and ontologies in the Greek language

related to this field did not return any results, in

contrast to the English language, for which thirty-six

(36) results were returned for taxonomies and one

hundred forty-one (141) results were returned for

ontologies. Regarding search terms, the terms:

“Εφοδιαστική”, “Εφοδιαστική Αλυσίδα”,

“Ταξινομία” and “Οντολογία” were used as

keywords for the Greek language and the terms

“Logistics”, “Supply Chain”, “Taxonomy” and

found in the terminological bases INFORTERM and

TELETERM, respectively.

[15], supporting him even after the sale of the

products to preserve them [16] (see: Green

Logistics, Reverse Logistics, Closed-loop Supply

Chain). Given the above, the goal of all companies

is sound and sustainable Supply Chain

Management, a subset of which is Logistics (various

opinions have been expressed regarding the

relationship between Supply Chain and Logistics;

for these opinions, [17], [18], which plans,

implements, and controls the efficient and effective

documenting their dynamic behavior. In particular,

they attempted to classify basic concepts from

various perspectives and investigated their scope

within the SC, trying to unify previous knowledge

requirements drive the choice of the Protégé

platform and the ontology language OWL (Web

Ontology Language). As emphasized by the authors

in [8], Protégé is a widespread open-source tool that

has expressiveness, provides the ability to import-

export data in several languages (Flogic, Jess, OIL,

XML, RDF, PROLOG, OWL, etc.) as well as to

change the coding language, has an inference engine

and an interface for the SWRL (Semantic Web Rule

Language), which is a language that combines OWL

validity check (via FACT and PA1 plugins). It is a

tool with an easy-to-use and interactive graphical

and the hierarchy of the classes, that is, the entities,

the objects, and their hierarchy, were defined with a

combination of bottom-up and top-down

approaches. More specifically, the basic classes of

the presented ontology are six (6): Supply Chain,

Flow, Product, Process, Stakeholders, and Purpose.

Their meaning and relationships are described

below, while the main entities and their

and the “Supply Chain” entity is based on it, as

without it none of the other entities could exist.

all those involved in the SC. Thus, it has as its sub-

classes the entities: “supplier”, “manufacturer”,

“transporter”, “service provider/3PL”, “distributor”,

“trader”, and “customer”. All these entities, except

the “customer” entity, are sub-classes of the

“Partners” entity. The “Stakeholders” entity is

conceptually linked to the “Process” entity, as

considered the three main factors that currently form

the structure of the Supply Chain:

activities that characterize chain supply.

5 Conclusion – Future approaches

The authors of this paper, aiming to capture and

represent key concepts of the Supply Chain,

implemented an ontology from scratch, intending to

be effective and efficient as well as having clarity

and objectivity, completeness and coherence

(coherence). The effectiveness of the ontology in

and simulating supply chain processes. Furthermore,

the main concern of the authors from now on will be

to make this ontology a valuable tool for decision-

making situations in the Supply Chain. Business

intelligence methods and processes will become

objects of research to design systematic decision-

making processes (decision trees) for the supply

chain as if they were control rules for dynamic

systems. During the operation phase of the system

as a Decision Support System, the problem elements

data or big data in the SC area, to ensure

completeness in terms and inference rules. This tool,

of course, can be generalized for other ontologies as

[6] T.R. Gruber, “A Translation Approach to

[7] N. Samaridi, N. Karanikolas, and E.