A Semantic Framework for E-Commerce Using Web Ontology Language 2

Abstract

 Several web applications have been deployed by business enterprises through which their products would not only be
made available on the internet, but also enable their prospective consumers to be able to follow some procedures to make
their purchases online. This is normally achieved with the help of some technologies provided by the Semantic Web,
namely Resource Description Framework (RDF), Resource Description Framework Schema (RDFS), DARPA Agent
Markup Language (DAML) plus Ontology Inference Layer (OIL) and Web Ontology Language (OWL1). The Present
study leverages on some of the Semantic Web technologies mentioned in the previous sentence in order to design a
Semantic framework for enhancing Business to Consumer (B2C) e-commerce applications. In this paper, the researchers
developed OWL 2 ontology rich in more expressive OWL constructs for rich entailments. Qualified Cardinality
Restriction (QCR) which OWL 2 is known for, is also applied to the ontology. Also in this paper, the researchers
compared two popular reasoners in querying the underlying ontology in a programmatic way. The overall aim of this
research is to provide a more efficient framework for B2C through the right choice and combination of some Semantic
Web languages.