Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Product Schema Integration For Electronic Commerce: A Synonym Comparison Approach, Guanghao Yan, Wee-Keong Ng, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In any electronic commerce system, the heterogeneity of product descriptions is a critical impediment to efficient business information exchange. In the ABECOS electronic commerce system, buyer agents, seller agents, and directory agents liaise with one another in e-commerce activities. Only when agents have a common ontology of product descriptions (also called product schemas) are they able to interact seamlessly in e-commerce activities. This gives rise to the product schema integration problem (PSI); the problem of integrating heterogeneous schemas of a certain product into one globally compatible schema. We adopt an integration approach based on product attribute synonyms. We give a …