Industrial strength ontology management

Abstract

. Ontologies are becoming increasingly prevalent and important in a wide range of e-commerce applications. E-commerce applications are using ontologies to support parametric searches, enhanced navigation and browsing, interoperable heterogeneous information systems, supplier enablement, configuration management, and transaction discovery. Applications such as information and service discovery and autonomous agents that are built on top of the emerging Semantic Web for the WWW also require extensive use of ontologies. Ontology-enhanced commercial applications, such as these and others require ontology management that is scalable (supporting thousands of simultaneous distributed users), available (running 365x24x7), fast, and reliable. This level of ontology management is necessary not only for the initial development and maintenance of ontologies, but is essential during deployment, when scalability, availability, reliability and performance are absolutely critical. VerticalNet's Ontology Builder and Ontology Server products are specifically designed to provide the ontology management infrastructure needed for e-commerce applications. These tools bring the best ontology and knowledge representation practices together with the best enterprise solutions architecture to provide a robust and scalable ontology management solution. 1