Ontologies for Corporate Web Applications

In this article, we discuss some issues that arise when ontologies are used to support corporate application domains such as electronic commerce (ecommerce) and some technical problems in deploying ontologies for real-world 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. We situate the discussion in the domain of business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce. 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.