Semantic Federation of Product Information from Structured and Unstructured Sources

• Published in: International journal of business data communications and networking Vol. 7; no. 2; pp. 69 - 97
• Main Authors: Wauer, Matthias, Meinecke, Johannes, Schuster, Daniel, Konzag, Andreas, Aleksy, Markus, Riedel, Till
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hershey IGI Global 01.04.2011
• Subjects: Business; Communities; Federations; Information management; Information retrieval; Information systems; Internet; Internet of Things; Knowledge bases (artificial intelligence); Knowledge management; Product information; Product life cycle; Semantics; Unstructured data
• ISSN: 1548-0631; 1548-064X
• DOI: 10.4018/jbdcn.2011040105

Product-related information can be found in various data sources and formats across the product lifecycle. Effectively exploiting this information requires the federation of these sources, the extraction of implicit information, and the efficient access to this comprehensive knowledge base. Existing solutions for product information management (PIM) are usually restricted to structured information, but most of the business-critical information resides in unstructured documents. We present a generic architecture for federating heterogeneous information from various sources, including the Internet of Things, and argue how this process benefits from using semantic representations. A reference implementation tailor-made to business users is explained and evaluated. We also discuss several issues we experienced that we believe to be valuable for researchers and implementers of semantic information systems, as well as the information retrieval community.