Product information meta-search framework for electronic commerce through ontology mapping

Abstract

The Semantic Web and Web services provide many opportunities in various applications such as product search and comparison in electronic commerce. We implemented an intelligent meta-search and comparison system for products through consideration of multiple attributes by using ontology mapping and Web services. Under the assumption that each shopping mall offers product ontology and a product search service with Web services, we proposed a meta-search framework to configure a customer's purpose, make and dispatch proper queries to each shopping mall, evaluate search results from malls, and show the customer the product list with a ranking. Ontology mapping is used for generating proper queries for malls that have different taxonomies of product categories. Also we implemented an inference based search engine using ontology and Web services for each mall. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.