PCS2OWL: A Generic Approach for Deriving Web Ontologies from Product Classification Systems

Abstract

Abstract. The classification of products and services enables reliable and efficient electronic exchanges of product data across organizations. Many companies classify products (a) according to generic or industryspecific product classification standards, or (b) by using proprietary category systems. Such classification systems often contain thousands of product classes that are updated over time. This implies a large quantity of useful product category information for e-commerce applications on the Web of Data. Thus, instead of building up product ontologies from scratch, which is costly, tedious, error-prone, and high-maintenance, it is generally easier to derive them from existing classifications. In this paper, we (1) describe a generic, semi-automated method for deriving OWL ontologies from product classification standards and proprietary category systems. Moreover, we (2) show that our approach generates logically and semantically correct vocabularies, and (3) present the practical benefit of our approach. The resulting product ontologies are compatible with the GoodRelations vocabulary for e-commerce and with schema.org and can be used to enrich product and offer descriptions on the Semantic Web with granular product type information from existing data sources.

Exploiting Freebase to Obtain GoodRelations-Based Product Ontologies

“…A similar project targeted directly on product ontologies is PCS2OWL [9] -a framework for transformation of non-ontological product classifications such as eCl@ss 16 into GR-based product ontologies. Although such classifications sometimes include product properties descriptions and PCS2OWL should allow to transform even those, it focuses mainly on transformation of the product taxonomy.…”

Ontological models for information retrieval of product-service

“…this is the backbone of research concerning the ontologies creation. For example, reusing top-level ontologies [53], ontology of properties [27], ontologies of complex spatiotemporal processes description [28], ontologies of graphoriented model [40].…”

“…PCS2OWL tool is proposed for the semi-automatic transformation of product classification systems in OWL ontologies [53] divided into two groups: product classification standards and proprietary product category systems. The authors show that the tool generates logically and semantically correct vocabularies.…”

“…Some of these models are based on ontologies [29,31,32,53,57]. Although encouraging results have been achieved, much remains to be seen, because each provided product-service has specific features.…”

“…In this sense, the use of metadata and ontologies represents a solution [3]. Hence, in the last few years, many software solutions [29,31,32,53,57] have been developed based on ontologies as a retrieval and classification model of information about catalogs of product-service.…”