Articulating autonomously distributed electronic product catalogues for constructing dynamic ConexNet

Abstract

The integration of ad hoc electronic product catalogues (EPCs) is an important issue in constructing dynamic global electronic markets. A particular issue in this integration process is that millions of ad hoc EPCs are autonomously distributed around the world on Internet and fully behave in their own ways. This leads to the unknown sources of their schemas and semantics and cannot adopt traditional product ontologies to mediate heterogeneous product information. To investigate the specific issues, this paper articulates both semantic conflict relations of ad hoc EPCs and their unique uneven distribution properties. By these articulations, it has developed a novel ConexNet on which uneven distributed and autonomous EPCs are aligned and linked in a semantic conflict-free way. Features are provided to examine how ConexNet is made to resolve semantic conflicts. Measuring criteria are proposed to evaluate the quality of ConexNet