The Role of Ontologies in eCommerce

Web technology is starting to penetrate many aspects of our daily life. Its importance as a medium for business transactions will grow significantly during the next few years. In terms of market volume B2B will be the most interesting area and it will also be the area where the new technology will lead to drastic changes in established customer relationships and business models. Simple established one2one trading relationships will be replaced by open and flexible n2m relationships between customers and vendors. However, this new flexibility in electronic trading also generates serious challenges for the parties who want to realize it. The main problem here is the heterogeneity of information descriptions used by vendors and customers. Product descriptions, catalog formats, and business documents are often unstructured and non-standardized. Intelligent solutions that help to mechanize the process of structuring, standardizing, aligning and personalizing are a key requisite to successfully overcome the current bottlenecks of eCommerce enabling its further growth. In this paper, we discuss the main problems in information integration in this area and describe how Ontology technology can help to solve many of them.