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

WebPicker: Knowledge Extraction from Web Resources

We show how information distributed in several web resources and represented in different restricted languages can be extracted from its original sources and transformed into a common knowledge model represented in XML using WebPicker. This information, which has been built to cover different needs and functionalities, can be later imported into WebODE, integrated, enriched and exported into different representation formats using WebODE specific modules. We show a case study in the e-commerce domain, using products and services standards from several organizations and/or joint initiatives of industrial and services companies, and a product catalogue from an e-commerce platform

A Framework for Design and Composition of Semantic Web Services

Semantic Web Services (SWS) are Web Services (WS) whose description is semantically enhanced with markup languages (e.g., OWL-S). This semantic description will enable external agents and programs to discover, compose and invoke SWSs. However, as a previous step to the specification of SWSs in a language, it must be designed at a conceptual level to guarantee its correctness and avoid inconsistencies among its internal components. In this paper, we present a framework for design and (semi) automatic composition of SWSs at a language-independent and knowledge level. This framework is based on a stack of ontologies that (1) describe the different parts of a SWS; and (2) contain a set of axioms that are really design rules to be verified by the ontology instances. Based on these ontologies, design and composition of SWSs can be viewed as the correct instantiation of the ontologies themselves. Once these instances have been created they will be exported to SWS languages such as OWL-S

Legal Ontologies for the spanish e-Government

The Electronic Government is a new field of applications for the semantic web where ontologies are becoming an important research technology. The e-Government faces considerable challenges to achieve interoperability given the semantic differences of interpretation, complexity and width of scope. In this paper we present the results obtained in an ongoing project commissioned by the Spanish government that seeks strategies for the e-Government to reduce the problems encountered when delivering services to citizens. We also introduce an e-Government ontology model; within this model a set of legal ontologies are devoted to representing the Real-estate transaction domain used to illustrate this paper

Selection of Ontologies for the Semantic Web

The development of the Semantic Web has encouraged the creation of ontologies in a great variety of domains. Web users currently looking for ontologies in order to incorporate them into their systems, just use their experience and intuition. This makes it difficult for them to justify their choices. Mainly, this is due to the lack of methods that help the user to measure that the most appropriate ontologies for the new system are. To solve this deficiency, this work proposes a method which allows the users to measure the suitability of the existent ontologies, regarding the requirements of their systems

ODEDialect: a set of declarative languages for implementing ontology translation systems

Implementing ontology translation systems is a complex task that requires taking many types of translation decisions, which are usually hidden inside their source code. In order to ease building, maintaining and understanding ontology translation systems, we propose ODEDialect, a set of languages to express translation decisions declaratively and at different layers: lexical, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. This paper describes the three languages that comprise ODEDialect: ODELex, which allows expressing transformations in the lexical layer; ODESyntax, which allows expressing transformations in the syntax layer; and ODESem, which allows expressing transformations in the semantic and pragmatic layers

Ontology translation approaches for interoperability: A case study with Protege-2000 and WebODE

We describe four ontology translation approaches that can be used to exchange ontologies between ontology tools and/or ontology languages. These approaches are analysed with regard to two main features: how they preserve the ontology semantics after the translation process (aka semantic or consequence preservation) and how they allow final users and ontology-based applications to understand the resulting ontology in the target format (aka pragmatic preservation). These approaches are illustrated with practical examples that show how they can be applied to achieve interoperability between the ontology tools Protege-2000 and WebODE

ODESWS, A Semantic Web Service Development

ODE SWS is a development environment to design Semantic Web Services (SWS) at the knowledge level. ODE SWS describe the service following a problem-solving approach in which the SWS are modeled using tasks, to represent the SWS functional features, and methods, to describe the SWS internal structure. In this paper, we describe the ODE SWS architecture and the capabilities of its graphical interface, which enables users to design SWS independently of the semantic markup language used to represent them

The integration of OntoClean in WebODE

Enterprises will only be interested in the use of ontologies if such ontologies are evaluated enough. Therefore, the development of ontology evaluation tools is a crucial matter. We have built the ODEClean module in the workbench for building ontologies named WebODE. ODEClean allows cleaning taxonomies following the OntoClean method, and WebODE provides technical support to the Methontology methodology for building ontologies. We approached the development of this module in two steps. Firstly, we have integrated the OntoClean method into the conceptualisation activity of Methontology. Secondly, we have designed and implemented ODEClean using a declarative approach for specifying the knowledge to be used on the evaluation. ODEClean uses: (a) the Top Level of Universals, (b) metaproperties based on philosophical notions, and (c) OntoClean evaluation axioms. The main advantage of this approach is that the system could easily allow the user relax or stress the evaluation of the taxonomy just selecting more or less meta-properties

Evaluation experiment of ontology tools’ interoperability with the WebODE ontology engineering workbench

This paper presents the results of the interoperability experiment proposed in EON2003, using the following ontology tools: Protégé-2000 and WebODE. We will show which knowledge is preserved and which knowledge is lost in the import/export processes between tools when using RDF(S) as an intermediate language