Product Schema Integration for Electronic Commerce: A synonym comparison approach

• Main Authors: YAN, Guanghao, NG, Wee-Keong, LIM, Ee Peng
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2002
• Subjects: Electronic commerce; product description; relational schema; schema integration; Databases and Information Systems; E-Commerce; Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/122; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/1121/viewcontent/Product_Schema_Integration_for_Electronic_Commerce.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

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