Enhancing Www E-commerce by Acquiring and Managing Product Knowledge

The WWW provides a semantic rich structure of information that, however, is primarily addressed to human understanding rather than automated processing by a computer. The problem of acquiring data from the WWW and organizing this data in a meaningful way, suitable for automated machine processing, has received a lot of attention during the last years, in the context of the new concept of semantic web. The aim of the paper is to present a data model suitable for organizing product knowledge acquired from the WWW and to propose the architecture of a software tool to implement this model and support the acquisition process. The acquired knowledge is either completely new or it extends (details) an existing one. The model is specified using an UML class diagram that is suitable to derive a RDF(S) representation. The acquired knowledge is useful to enhance the electronic commerce capabilities of shopping agents.