Ontology-Based Customer Complaint Management

This paper presents an ontology-based approach for managing and maintaining multilingual online customer complaints. To achieve trust and transparency in e-commerce communications and transactions, effective and cross-border complaint platforms need to be established and may be integrated in e-business activities. The effectiveness and width of such complaint service platforms depend on rising to several challenges, such as the sensitivity of business regulations and complaint resolution, the language and cultural diversity of the cross-border business parties, the extensibility according to the market needs and standards. In this paper, we show how such challenges can be addressed and simplified: first, we propose the construction of an ontology that captures the core knowledge of the customer complaint domain. Second, we show how the extensibility of a complaint platform can be simplified and managed. Finally, we show how a multilingual representation of this ontology may be constructed. This paper outlines our main achievements in Topic Panel 6 (“Ontology, Extensibility and Integration”), which is a special interest group in the EU CCFORM Thematic Network project1.