One core task in using the Web for E-Commerce applications is the search for suitable suppliers. Unfortunately, using traditional search engines like Google for discovering suitable offerings is unsatisfying. In this project, we are developing a comprehensive framework and reference implementation for electronic procurement on the basis of Semantic Web technology. This includes a set of ontologies, tools for the annotation of existing Web offerings, and infrastructure for the accelerating the maintenance of products and services vocabularies.

Team: Martin Hepp, Andreas Radinger
Project Web site: http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/sweep/
Funded by: FFG/BMVIT FIT-IT Semantic Systems, University of Innsbruck, Florida Gulf Coast University

Products and services categorization standards (PSCS), like UNSPSC, eCl@ss, eOTD, or the RosettaNet Technical Dictionary (RNTD) form a valuable set of concepts from the product and services domain and reflect some degree of consensus. They are thus a promising foundation for the creation of products and services ontologies. Existing approaches for this task, however, do neither properly reflect the specific semantics of the respective categorization standards, nor do they sufficiently address the high versioning dynamics due to product innovation. In this project we are developing a comprehensive approach for the proper reuse of such standards in product ontologies and are continously releasing current OWL DLP/Lite versions of eCl@ss

Team: Martin Hepp, Andreas Radinger
Project Web site: http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/eclassowl/
Funded by: University of Innsbruck, Florida Gulf Coast University, Bundeswehr University Munich

A promising application domain for Semantic Web technology is the annotation of products and services offerings on the Web so that consumers and enterprises can search for suitable suppliers using products and services ontologies. While there has been substantial progress in developing ontologies for types of products and services, namely eClassOWL, this alone does not provide the representational means required for e-commerce on the Semantic Web. Particularly missing is an ontology that allows describing the relationships between Web resources and offerings made by means of those Web resources.

The GoodRelations ontology provides the vocabulary for annotating e-commerce offerings (1) to sell, lease, repair, dispose, and maintain commodity products and (2) to provide commodity services. GoodRelations allows describing the relationship between (1) Web resources, (2) offerings made by those Web resources, (3) legal entities, (4) prices, (5) terms and conditions, and the aforementioned ontologies for products and services (6).

Project Web site: http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/
Funded by: FIT-IT Semantic Systems, University of Innsbruck, Florida Gulf Coast University, Bundeswehr University Munich

We are working on a tool that helps operators of small Web shops generating GoodRelations-compliant annotations of their offerings.

Project Web site: http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/annotator/
Funded by: FFG/BMVIT FIT-IT Semantic Systems, Bundeswehr University Munich

A recurring task in managing catalogs and other data of Web offerings is the proper classification of individual products according to a given hierarchy. myClassify is an open-source API that implements standard machine-learning algorithms for the classification of product descriptions.

Project Web site: http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/myclassify/
Funded by: University of Innsbruck

One paramount problem for E-Commerce solutions based on Semantic Web technology is the lack of high-quality ontologies for products and services, in particular such that are up-to-date. In the myOntology project, we use the infrastructure and culture of Wikis as an ontology workbench that fosters true collaborative, community-driven ontology creation and maintenance in the products and services domain, and establish a standardized framework for ontology-based products and services description for E-Commerce applications.

Project Web site: http://www.myontology.org/
Funded by: FFG/BMVIT FIT-IT Semantic Systems

By applying the GenTax algorithm (see below), we have derived a consistent OWL ontology from the United Nations Standard Products and Services Classification (UNSPSC).

Project Web site: http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/unspscowl/
Funded by: FFG/BMVIT FIT-IT Semantic Systems

There is now a renewed and growing interest in exploiting ontologies, of varying expressiveness and focus, for advancing the state of the art in business process management, in particular in ERP-centric IT landscapes. The term "Semantic Business Process Management" has been suggested for the described branch of research in an early 2005 paper, which is now frequently cited as the first description of the overall vision. A flagship activity in the field is the European research project "SUPER", with more than a dozen premier industrial and academic partners, among them SAP, IDS Scheer, and IBM.

Project Web site: http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/sbpm/
Funded by: European Commission FP6 and FP7

MUSING aims at developing a new generation of Business Intelligence (BI) tools and modules founded on semantic-based knowledge and content systems. MUSING will integrate Semantic Web and Human Language technologies and combine declarative rule-based methods and statistical approaches for enhancing the technological foundations of knowledge aquisition and reasoning in BI applications.

Project Web site: http://www.musing.eu/
Funded by: European Commission, 6th Framework Programme

The documentation of Enterprise Research Planning (ERP) systems is usually (1) extremely large and (2) combines various views from the business and the technical implementation perspective. Also, a very specific vocabulary has evolved, in particular in the SAP domain (e.g. SAP Solution Maps or SAP software module names). This vocabulary is not clearly mapped to business management terminology and concepts. In this project, we evaluate the use of ontologies and automatic annotation of such large HTML software documentation in order to improve the usability and accessibility, namely of ERP help files.

Project Web site: http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/ontonavi/
Funded by: University of Innsbruck, Bundeswehr University Munich

The goal of this project is to combine Semantic Web services and Business Process Management, and develop one consolidated technology. Specifically, we will create horizontal ontologies which describe business processes; vertical telecommunications oriented ontologies to support domain-specific annotation for our chosen economic sector; and a suite of tools based on the results of the European projects SEKT and DIP.

Project Web site: http://super.semanticweb.org/
Funded by: European Commission, 6th Framework Programme

Hierarchical classifications are likely the largest asset we can exploit for building domain ontologies for the Semantic Web. Unfortunately, they mostly suffer from numerous conceptual inconsistencies, in particular regarding the semantics of the hierarchy relation, which makes deriving OWL ontologies a non-trivial task. The GenTax algorithms uses a straightforward heuristic in combination with random samples in order to produce consistent, lightweight ontologies from hierarchical classifications with minimal human intervention.

Project Web site: http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/gentax/
Funded by: FFG/BMVIT FIT-IT Semantic Systems; European Commission, 6th Framework Programme

In this project, we evaluate the usage of ontologies for improved spend analysis.

Project Web site: http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/ontospend/
Funded by: University of Innsbruck and Bundeswehr University Munich

Despite significant advancement in technology and tools, building ontologies, annotating data, and aligning multiple ontologies remain tasks that highly depend on human intelligence, both as a source of domain expertise and for making conceptual choices. This means that people need to contribute time, and sometimes other resources, to this endeavor.

As a novel solution, we have proposed to masquerade core tasks of weaving the Semantic Web behind on-line, multi-player game scenarios, in order to create proper incentives for humans to contribute. Doing so, we adopt the findings from the already famous "games with a purpose" by von Ahn, who has shown that presenting a useful task, which requires human intelligence, in the form of an on-line game can motivate a large amount of people to work heavily on this task, and this for free.

Project Web site: http://www.ontogame.org/
Funded by: FFG/BMVIT FIT-IT Semantic Systems

While there exists numerous hierarchical classifications for many domains of interest, the number of respective domain ontologies in OWL or RDF-S is still limited. Such classifications can be reused for building respective ontologies, but this process is not as trivial as one may assume. We have developed a generic algorithm and online tool that can convert hierarchical classifications available in the W3C SKOS format into consistent OWL DLP / Lite ontologies.

Team: Martin Hepp, Andreas Radinger
Project Web site: http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/skos2gentax/
Funded by: University of Innsbruck and Bundeswehr University Munich

The fundamental research results from the Semantic Web community have reached a substantial level of maturity. However, in order for these research achievements to materialize into large scale corporate applications, they must be complemented by prototypes, methods, and best practices which support enterprises in the adoption of Semantic Web technology. In this project, we will develop (1) convincing showcases and proofs-of-concept that demonstrate the technical feasibility in relevant business scenarios, (2) methods to assess the costs and business value of semantic technology; in particular, such that help estimate the costs involved in the development and usage of ontologies, and to quantify the operational and strategic benefits of ontology-based systems; and (3) metrics to evaluate and compare existing ontologies, ontology engineering methodologies, and tools in terms of technical quality and organizational fit.

Funded by: Young Researchers Grant, University of Innsbruck

DIP’s objective is to develop and extend Semantic Web and Web Service technologies in order to produce a new technology infrastructure for Semantic Web Services (SWS) - an environment in which different Web services can discover and cooperate with each other automatically.

Project Web site: http://dip.semanticweb.org/
Funded by: European Commission, 6th Framework Programme

Formal correctness is just a precondition for a useful ontology. Equally important is the ontology content, i.e. how well the available collection of concepts satisfies the linguistic requirements of a specific domain. Recent research has shown that a major problem in the development and maintenance of ontologies for products and services is the terminological dynamics in markets: New products or business concepts evolve quickly and require new product classes, and existing products change and demand for new properties. It can be assumed that the problem of dynamics with regard to concepts in a domain is of general importance. This indicates the need for additional research in the field of ontology maintenance in order to support a timelier and more comprehensive capture of the active vocabulary in a given domain. In this context, metrics can help monitor the progress in the development and maintenance of ontologies.

The interoperability of electronic marketplaces is extremely attractive, because the connection between comparatively few marketplaces would integrate a very large number of enterprises. Currently, there are several architectural approaches under discussion, e.g.
- megaexchanges,
- message broadcasting between marketplaces,
- peer-to-peer concept etc.

More attractive, however, seems the approach to links marketplaces via intelligent agents that perform inter-marketplace trade. We were working on frameworks and connectors (middleware), required ontologies, product matching and ranking strategies.