Maintaining Property Libraries in Product Classification Schemes

Semantic interoperability in B2B e-commerce can be achieved by committing to a product ontology that establishes a shared and common understanding of a product domain. This issue is mainly subject of standard product classification schemes. Recently, considerable research and industry work has been carried out on enhancing the semantic richness of these schemes. Providing specific property lists for each product class can be seen as a step towards true product ontologies. Horizontal classification schemes, however, often consist of more than 10,000 classes, several thousand properties, and an even greater number of classproperty relations. Given the new requirement towards property-centric classification, maintaining these business vocabularies is mainly determined by strategies for managing the property definitions and their relationships to classes. This paper proposes measures for coping with the problem of extensive and steadily growing property libraries. It can be shown that implementing these measures greatly influences both standards makers and standards adopters.