Towards personalization in digital libraries through ontologies

In this paper we describe a browsing and searching personalization system for digital libraries based on the use of ontologies for describing the relationships between all the elements which take part in a digital library scenario of use. The main goal of this project is to help the users of a digital library to improve their experience of use by means of two complementary strategies: first, by maintaining a complete history record of his or her browsing and searching activities, which is part of a navigational user profile which includes preferences and all the aspects related to community involvement; and second, by reusing all the knowledge which has been extracted from previous usage from other users with similar profiles. This can be accomplished in terms of narrowing and focusing the search results and browsing options through the use of a recommendation system which organizes such results in the most appropriate manner, using ontologies and concepts drawn from the semantic web field. The complete integration of the experience of use of a digital library in the learning process is also pursued. Both the usage and information organization can be also exploited to extract useful knowledge from the way users interact with a digital library, knowledge that can be used to improve several design aspects of the library, ranging from internal organization aspects to human factors and user interfaces. Although this project is still on an early development stage, it is possible to identify all the desired functionalities and requirements that are necessary to fully integrate the use of a digital library in an e-learning environment

Integrating e-commerce standards and initiatives in a multi-layered ontology

The proliferation of different standards and joint initiatives for the classification of products and services (UNSPSC, e-cl@ss, RosettaNet, NAICS, SCTG, etc.) reveals that B2B markets have not reached a consensus on the coding systems, on the level of detail of their descriptions, on their granularity, etc. This paper shows how these standards and initiatives, which are built to cover different needs and functionalities, can be integrated in an ontology using a common multi-layered knowledge architecture. This multi-layered ontology will provide a shared understanding of the domain for applications of e-commerce, allowing the information sharing between heterogeneous systems. We will present a method for designing ontologies from these information sources by automatically transforming, integrating and enriching the existing vocabularies with the WebODE platform. As an illustration, we show an example on the computer domain, presenting the relationships between UNSPSC, e-cl@ss, RosettaNet and an electronic catalogue from an e-commerce platform

Intelligent Product Brokering for E-Commerce: An Incremental Approach to Unaccounted Attribute Detection

This research concentrates on designing generic product-brokering agent to understand user preference towards a product category and recommends a list of products to the user according to the preference captured by the agent. The proposed solution is able to detect both quantifiable and non-quantifiable attributes through a user feedback system. Unlike previous approaches, this research allows the detection of unaccounted attributes that are not within the ontology of the system. No tedious change of the algorithm, database, or ontology is required when a new product attribute is introduced. This approach only requires the attribute to be within the description field of the product. The system analyzes the general product descriptions field and creates a list of candidate attributes affecting the user’s preference. A genetic algorithm verifies these candidate attributes and excess attributes are identified and filtered off. A prototype has been created and our results show positive results in the detection of unaccounted attributes affecting a user

Towards intelligent web services: the web service modeling ontology (WSMO)

The Semantic Web and the Semantic Web Services build a natural application area for Intelligent Agents, namely querying and reasoning about structured knowledge and semantic descriptions of services and their interfaces on the Web. This paper provides an overview of the Web Service Modeling Ontology, a conceptual framework for the semantical description of Web services