A Pragmatic Approach to Model and Exploit the Semantics of Product Information

Recently researchers have tried to apply ontology to the product information domain. From a practical point of view, a key problem to streamline this trend is how to make a product ontology database operational. Technical solutions should consider the characteristics that a pragmatic product ontology database contains; first, the database size is quite huge, and second, ontological manipulation and utilization should be realistically feasible. We recently engaged in a project to build an operational product ontology system. The system is designed to serve as a product ontology knowledge base, not only for the design and construction of product databases but also for the search and discovery of products. From the insights gained through this project, we believe that ontological modeling and its implementation on an operational database, as well as the building applications which exploit ontological benefits, are the most important facets towards the successful deployment of a practical product ontology system. As such, searching techniques should take into account the features of an underlying ontological model especially with product searching being one of the most popular applications within product information systems. In this paper, we present these two issues; product ontology modeling and searching techniques. Although our work presented herein may not be the only way to build an operational product ontology database, it may serve as an important reference model for similar projects in future.