Constructing Ontology-Based Product Catalogs System for E-business

To operate in an e-business environment, an organization has to have a good command of knowledge on its markets, customers, products and services, methods and processes, competitors, employee skills and its regulatory environment. A base of clearly defined product information is a key foundation for an e-business system. The manipulation and exchange of semantically enriched and precise e-catalogs can enhance the quality of an e-business system. Product information consists of product attributes and the relationships between products. Ontology can play an important role in the formalization of product information to construct e-catalogs. In this paper, we utilize ontology to build an e-catalogs system for e-business. The system is designed to serve as product ontology knowledge base, not only for the design and construction of product databases but also for search and discovery of products. We discuss some issues including product ontology modeling and ontology implementation. The work presented herein may serve as a reference model for similar systems.