Concept Acquisition Modeling for E-commerce Ontology

Abstract

To bolster the interoperability of agent-based commerce systems, trading agents are expected to adopt a set of common ontologies. Although there are extant general-purpose ontologies and approaches of engineering them, there seem to be no ontology that is specific for e-commerce or the methodologies for constructing e-commerce ontology. This chapter presents a concept acquisition modeling approach to facilitate the acquisition, classification and representation of e-commerce concepts. It proposes a systematic way to make comparisons between concepts based upon some understanding of their semantics. The process is comprised of classification criteria, questions scheme, rules for classifying relations and optimization, and concept representation for the e-commerce based ontology. Of particular interest is the use of context-dependent and language-independent classification knowledge. The explicit representation nature of the approach enables the development of shared ontologies and its reuse in other ontologies and applications.