Product schema integration for electronic commerce-a synonym comparison approach

• Published in: IEEE transactions on knowledge and data engineering Vol. 14; no. 3; pp. 583 - 598
• Main Authors: Yan, Guanghao, Ng, Wee Keong, Lim, Ee-Peng
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.05.2002; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Approximation; Business; Descriptions; Directories; Electronic commerce; Electronics; Heterogeneity; Impedance; Internet; Ontologies
• ISSN: 1041-4347; 1558-2191
• DOI: 10.1109/TKDE.2002.1000344

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 formal definition of the problem and show that it is NP-complete. We contrast our approach of study to conventional schema integration in federated databases. We also propose a set of approximate algorithms for PSI and evaluate their performance.