A Study on a Formal Ontology Model: Constructing a Customer Ontology in a CRM Context

Ontology is defined as an explicit specification of a conceptualization. The customer ontology is a specific application of ontology to customer domain, which can provide a unified view to customers for better sharing customer knowledge. In this paper, an formal ontology model is constructed using Description Logic, which is a 6-tuples including Term Set, Individual Set, Term Definition Set, Instantiation Assertion Set, Term Restriction Set, Term Comment Set. Based on the model, the issue on ontology validation is studied with the conclusion that the four kinds of term validation, including term satisfiability validation, term subsumption validation, term equivalence validation and term disjointness validation, can be reduced to the satisfiability validation, and satisfiability validation can be transformed into instantiation consistence validation, which can be decided by Tableau Algorithm. At last, the issue on the construction of customer ontology in the CRM context is discussed.