Ontologies for Corporate Web Applications

In particular, we focus on issues of ontology integration and the related problem of semantic mapping, that is, the mapping of ontologies and taxonomies to reference ontologies to preserve semantics. Along the way, we discuss what typically constitutes an ontology architecture. By its very nature, B2B e-commerce must try to interlink buyers and sellers from multiple companies with disparate product-description terminologies and meanings, thus serving as a paradigmatic case for the use of ontologies to support corporate applications. Commercial organizations are seeking to codify web services using such formalizations as the universal description, discovery, and integration (UDDI) specification. There are efforts to standardize intelligent agent technology, such as the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA). These efforts at standardization must use ontologies if emerging internet applications are to be powered by semantics, the meaning behind advanced applications and their enterprise-level and community-level transactions. In this article, we discuss some issues that arise when ontologies are used to support corporate application domains such as electronic commerce (e-commerce) and some technical problems in deploying ontologies for realworld use. In particular, we focus on issues of ontology integration and the related problem of semantic mapping, that is, the mapping of ontologies and taxonomies to reference ontologies to preserve semantics. Along the way, we discuss what typically constitutes an ontology architecture and provide a short summary of ontology development tools. By its very nature, B2B e-commerce must try to interlink buyers and sellers from multiple companies with disparate product-description terminologies and meanings, thus serving as a paradigmatic case for the use of ontologies to support corporate applications. The "vocabularies" for ontologies, as discussed in the introduction to this special issue, are distinct at different levels.