Semantic Information Retrieval Based on Fuzzy Ontology for Electronic Commerce

Information retrieval is the important work for Electronic Commerce. Ontology-based semantic retrieval is a hotspot of current research. In order to achieve fuzzy semantic retrieval, this paper applies a fuzzy ontology framework to information retrieval system in E-Commerce. The framework includes three parts: concepts, properties of concepts and values of properties, in which property’s value can be either standard data types or linguistic values of fuzzy concepts. The semantic query expansions are constructed by order relation, equivalence relation, inclusion relation, reversion relation and complement relation between fuzzy concepts defined in linguistic variable ontologies with Resource Description Framework (RDF). The application to retrieve customer, product and supplier information shows that the framework can overcome the localization of other fuzzy ontology models, and this research facilitates the semantic retrieval of information through fuzzy concepts on the Semantic Web.