Design of a Modular Ontology for South African Informal Sector Services

The high unemployment rate in South Africa has encouraged several types of informal occupational and business activities in the informal business sector of South Africa. Just like in many Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries, the South African informal sector has many challenges such as lack of organisation, poor regulation, poor service delivery, lowcapitalisation, and lowproductivity to contend with. Attempts have been made to address some of these challenges through the application of ICT. One of the proposed solutions is the use of electronicweb portal technology to promote informal businesses and facilitate informal business transactions. However, to attain maximum impact, the platform must be enabled with artificial intelligence (AI) to create a system that can leverage the convergence of intelligent reasoning and semantic technology in tackling the challenges of the South African informal sector. In essence, such aweb portalmust possess capabilities such as semantic-based reasoning, semantic analysis of user queries, and intelligent recommendations, which require the existence of a dedicated domain ontology. In this paper, we present the conceptual design and prototype development of amodular ontology for the informal sector of South Africa.