Extension of Open Source Web Shop and CMS Software for Semantic Web-based E-Commerce

Abstract

Most resources on the World Wide Web are designed for representational purposes rather than facilitating to machines access for data exchange. The same issue applies to conventional output formats in e-commerce applications. This thesis aims at improving OS Web shop and CMS software by extending it with capabilities for the Semantic Web. Such extensions render e-commerce applications more interesting and popular for the local economy. The ontology GoodRelations, a standard vocabulary for e-commerce and complementing eClassOWL, is used to describe products and services offerings and their relationships to other resources in a machine-readable format. Thereby, taking advantage of GoodRelations, offerings of products and services are more easily distributed between computers. Herewith, when searching for suitable products, customers and enterprises can save several hours of working time. By issuing e-commerce applications with the GoodRelations ontology, powerful tools can emerge to annotate products and services offerings on the Web. Within the scope of this thesis, two prototypes for the Semantic Web-based e-commerce are developed. Besides RDF/XML dump output, the systems support also RDFa. RDFa enables to embed interchangeable formats as metadata in a set of XHTML attributes. To demonstrate the impact of Semantic Web on e-commerce, a Semantic Web-aware search engine is notified of the Web shops’ product metadata.

Publication
Master thesis, University of Innsbruck, Austria, Faculty of Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics
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