Ontology-based Product Catalogues: An Example Implementation

Electronic Product Catalogues are the basis for offering and selling products in online market places. To be efficient, these catalogues have to provide a semantically precise description of product features to allow for effective matchmaking of products and customer requests. At the same time, the description has to follow a common terminology that allows the integration with the catalogues of other providers on the same market place. In this paper, we argue for the use of ontologies as a basis for defining product catalogues. More precisely, we suggest using eClassOWL, an ontological model of the eClass Standard as a basis for encoding product information as formal class descriptions in the web ontology language OWL. We support our argument by presenting an ontology based implementation of a real product catalogue that uses eClass terminology and supports flexible matchmaking based on approximate logical reasoning.