Ontology Engineering for Active Catalog

The exponential growth of the Internet and increasing communication and computational power have created many opportunities for advancing engineering, manufacturing and business activities. Although rich in content, existing catalog systems are poor in both search quality and the usage of the retrieved information. The Active Catalog brings a conceptually new idea to electronic commerce by providing new, computationally usable, catalog information environment about products and their applications. It is designed for finding and using information in building applications in design, logistics, and electronic commerce in the context of heterogeneous, Internet-based distributed computing environments. This paper focuses on increasing the quality of search results and providing users with easy access to catalog information. We provide various ways of understanding user requirements and powerful reasoning capabilities, so that the catalog service can correctly capture the user goals and improve hit ratio and coverage of the results.