Yellow Pages on the Semantic Web

Yellow pages catalogs and corresponding directory services on the web are a widely used business concept for helping people to find companies providing services and selling products. When on the web, matching the customer’s need with the relevant services offerred by companies is typically based on keyword search, table-based search, a list of service categories listed in some order, a hierarchical category system, or a combination of these. In spite of the versatility of possibilities, it can still be difficult to the end-user to map a need on the services offered. On the other hand, for the catalog advertiser, it may be difficult to index the service in such a way that the prospects would not miss the service. We propose that in order to enhance the recall and precision of yellow page services, the advertisements should be annotated using semantic web ontologies. Based on such conceptual definitions, the user can be provided with new content-based searching and browsing facilities, which makes the service more profitable to the advertisers and the directory service provider. As a first step towards this goal, an experimental semantic yellow page implementation is presented.