Use of ontology to manage a consumer product website : a study of a mobile phone site

• Main Author: Zhang, Xin
• Other Authors: Khoo Soo Guan, Christopher
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: DRNTU::Business::Information technology::Mobile commerce
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/15265
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Websites are good platforms to represent information and for marketing of consumer products. Since consumer products have many features and they need to provide efficient support, the system is required to cater to a large number of customers. However, most websites are not very well structured to clearly represent product information and user support services. An ontology is a good tool to represent the domain knowledge concepts and with relations between the concepts. A structure defined by ontology in the specific domain defines the content and rules through which information is organized. This dissertation discusses how an ontology is structured to manage complex information on an consumer product website. The ontology formed here presents information on product features, accessory, user support, customization and advertisement. These form the key components in representing consumer product. Within the ontology, there are five taxonomies to categorize information into a hierarchical structure linking every component with appropriate relations. The Nokia mobile phone website was chosen as a study case, because it contains many characteristics of mobile phones presented as features on its website. The objective is to develop an ontology that represents complicated mobile phone features, as well as user support services for the website users. Case study of Nokia website and a small scale user survey were conducted to understand the data and functional requirements for constructing such as ontology. The Protégé software was used to model the structure. This ontology was evaluated by using it on two other websites in the same industry-SonyEricsson and Samsung. The usability and limitations were found after the evaluation, and recommendations on how to better support consumer product websites were provided.