Concept exchange: constructing interoperable electronic product catalogues in an emergent environment

Research in interoperability of electronic product catalogues has primarily focused on resolving semantic conflicts arisen from the heterogeneously designed electronic product catalogues. We argue that while existing integration strategies providing static connections between various heterogeneous catalogues over mediating ontologies, ontologies themselves exhibit heterogeneity and lack of evolvability. What's more, reclassifying terms to link public ontologies is very difficult to avoid inaccuracy problem that is critical to electronic commerce. This paper highlights the problems of flexibility, exactness and evolvability that have received little attention in the literature and provides an overview of the concept exchange approach to interoperability. It illustrates why this is able to better solve the identified problems, presents the different features compared with other approaches and suggests how the concept exchange framework is working.