Controlling Property Growth in Product Classification Schemes: A Data Management Approach

Product classification schemes aim at semantic interoperability in B2B e-commerce by providing consensual definitions of product categories and recommending properties for describing product instances. Considerable industry work has been carried out on enhancing the size and thus coverage of these schemes. Horizontal classification schemes, however, often consist of more than 10,000 classes, several thousand properties, and an even greater number of class-property relations. The problem is that maintaining these schemes becomes more and more demanding in particular due to the number of definitions and interrelations. This paper proposes measures for coping with the problem of extensive and steadily growing property libraries. We view these schemes from a data modeling perspective and relate the proposed measures to the underlying conceptual data model of product classification schemes. It can be shown that these measures greatly influence both standards makers and standards adopters.