Conceptual and formal ontology model of e-Catalogs

Ontology concerns with the nature and relations of being. Electronic catalog contains rich semantics associated with products, and serves as a challenging practical domain for ontology application. It is beneficial to model e-Catalogs based not only on the definition of each product class and the taxonomic hierarchy of classes but also on the associated semantic knowledge. Ontology can play an important role in e-Commerce as a formalization of e-Catalogs. However, an ontological modeling should not be technically too complicated to represent and comprehend the e-Catalog domain for a domain expert who has little knowledge in the formal language. In this paper, we present an ontological representation of e-Catalogs, which is both conceptual and formal. We take an Extended Entity Relationship approach to denote the fundamental set of modeling constructs, and present corresponding description logic representation for each construct. We also consider the modeling language to be reasonably practical with regard to its expressiveness and complexity. We illustrate sample e-Catalog modeling scenarios to demonstrate the practical feasibility of our modeling approach.