Open Ontology Environment for semantic Web-based e-Commerce

Keywords: In this document, we delineate the state of the art in fields related to the myOntology project including wikis, semantic wikis, ontology formalisms, ontology change management, triple stores, ontology visualization, user interface techniques, and achieving community consensus. The main challenge for the use of ontologies in fast changing areas such as e-commerce is to provide comprehensive and up-to-date ontologies for various product and service areas. Even though several well-elaborated upper ontologies exist, only few domain ontologies can be found on the Web. However, for the promises of the Semantic Web to materialize, a higher degree of specificity of ontologies is required. The reasons for the lack of useful domain ontologies include that (1) informal means to convey intended meaning more efficiently are used for ontology specification only to a very limited extent, (2) many relevant domains of discourse show a high degree of conceptual dynamics, (3) ontology representation languages are hard to understand for the majority of (potential) ontology users, and (4) the community does not have control over the ontology evolution. In the myOntology project, we plan (1) to use Wiki infrastructure to enable collaborative and community-driven ontology building by giving users who have no or little expertise in ontology engineering the opportunity to contribute, (2) the specification of user roles and processes supporting community consensus, and (3) the combination of external Web resources to improve ontology building. The project involves many different research areas: Ontology engineering: Different methodologies, both centralized and decentralized , for ontology engineering exist, which is a valuable input for our project. Wikis: The culture and infrastructure of wikis will be the backbone of the system. Semantic wikis: substantial work has already been done in the area of Semantic Wikis. Ontology representation formalisms: myOntology will rely on a very simple meta-model, which will probably be a subset of an existing ontology representation formalism. Storage of ontology data: ontology data as well as administrative data (e.g. user management) will be stored in a triple store. Ontology change management: Ontologies are as dynamic as the domain of discourse they model. Especially in e-commerce, domains change often. Thus, myOntology has to support ontology evolution, versioning as well as merging and mapping of different ontologies. Ontology visualization: In the collaborative, community-driven ontology engineering paradigm it is extremely important, that the meaning of a concept is obvious and easily understandable. We propose to use visualization techniques additionally to a …