Building an operational product ontology system

A base of clearly defined product information is a key foundation for an e-commerce system. The manipulation and exchange of semantically enriched and precise product information can enhance the quality of an e-commerce system and offer a high level of interoperability with other systems. Product information consists of product attributes and the relationships between products. Product categorization (or classification) is one type of such relationships. Ontology can play an important role in the formalization of product information. Although the idea of utilizing ontology for e-Catalogs has been raised before, we are yet to find an operational implementation of applying ontology in the domain. In this paper, we report on our recent effort to build an operational product ontology system for a government procurement service. The system is designed to serve as a product ontology knowledge base; not only for the design and construction of product databases but also for search and discovery of products. Especially, the keyword-based searching over product ontology database demands different techniques from those over conventional document databases or relational databases, and should be designed to reflect particular characteristics of product ontology. We also introduce some other issues that we have experienced in the project, and those issues include product ontology modeling, ontology construction and maintenance, and visualization. Our work presented herein may serve as a reference model for similar projects in the future.