AN IMPROVED SEMANTIC WEB-BASED SEARCH MODEL FOR E-COMMERCE USING OWL2

ABSTRACT

Information sharing across independent web applications seems impossible with just the static world wide web applications. Meanwhile, with the advent of the semantic web, web applications interoperability through information sharing and Linked Data have been achieved. This interoperability is usually presented as a decentralized system that allows agents to crawl over them for information sharing or gathering, and is employed in developing web applications like E-Commerce. However, the existing e-Commerce model is being limited by its knowledge representation language. This model employs ontological approach using OWL for knowledge modeling and representation. Hence, this research seeks to create an improved e-commerce ontological base model which has a more rich and expressive knowledge base with OWL2 for knowledge modeling and representation. This knowledgebase will be compared against the e-Commerce knowledgebase that was modeled with OWL. Search results from the new knowledge base by the user yielded a more specific and needful outcome as compared to search on the knowledge base created with OWL.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background to the Study

The history of bartering dates all the way back to 6000 BC, introduced by Mesopotamia tribes, bartering was adopted by Phoenicians. Phoenicians bartered goods to those located in various cities across the oceans.(BSH, 2016). That time, the exchange of goods or services was on the grounds of giving out a product or service so as to own another product, good or service as may be the case. With time, the idea of having a measurable medium that will be best used for exchange of goods or services came into trading. Commerce which relates to all economic activities resulting in production, exchange, distribution and consumption of commodities and services, dates back to the history of man (Dhanapal et al., 2004). The commercial activities involve a seller (the owner of the product or service meant for exchange) and a buyer (the person who needs the product or service presented for exchange). The buyer bargains for the good or service, when an agreement is reached, then he makes the payment. When the world wide web(WWW) was developed in 1993 by Tim Berners-Lee, the director of world Wide Web Consortium(W3C) (Gruber, 1993), attention was not given to it, but when it became a medium for e-commerce and social networking all over the globe, it was amazingly patronise. The web has the following categories: Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 , 4.0 and Web 5.0. Web 1.0 could be considered as the ―read-only web.‖(WEB1.0,2016). In other words, the early web allowed users to search for information and read it. There was very little in the way of user interaction or content contribution. The first shopping cart applications, which most e-commerce website owners use in some shape or form, basically fall under the category of Web 1.0. The overall goal was to present products to potential customers, much as a catalog or a brochure does — only through a website retailers could also provide a method for anyone (anywhere in the world) to purchase (their) products. The year 1999 marked the beginning of a Read-Write-Publish era with notable contributions from LiveJournal (Launched in April, 1999) and Blogger (Launched in August, 1999). Now even a non-technical user can actively interact and contribute to the web using different blog platforms. Considering Berners-Lee‘s method of describing it, the Web 2.0, or the ―read-write‖ web has the ability to contribute content and interact with other web users. This interaction and contribution has dramatically changed the landscape of the web. The Web 2.0 appears to be a welcome response to a web users demand to be more involved in what information is available to them.This era empowered the common user with a few new concepts like Blogs, Social-Media & Video-Streaming. Publishing your content is only a few clicks away! Few remarkable developments of Web 2.0 are Twitter, YouTube, eZineArticles, Flickr and Facebook. Web 3.0 is the ―read-write-execute‖ web. Semantic markup and web services forms it's basis, the context of Web 3.0, take center stage by combining a semantic markup and web services, which promises the potential for applications that can speak to each other directly, and for broader searches for information through simpler interfaces. Web 4.0also known as the ―Mobile Web‖ connects all devices in the real and virtual world in real-time. Web 5.0 is about the (emotional) interaction between humans and computers. The interaction will become a daily habit for a lot of people based on neurotechnology. For the moment web is ―emotionally‖ neutral, which means web does not perceive the users feel and emotions. This will change with web 5.0 – emotional web. One example of this is www.wefeelfine.org, which maps emotions of people. With headphones on, users will interact with content that interacts with their emotions or changes in facial recognition,(WEB1.0, 2016). With the coming of these web advancements, organizations and enterprises are taking the advantage by using them to increase their sales and access the world. Several developments in online trading or e-commerce have emerged as a result of these advances in web technology. Notable among these is the internet shopping robots, sometimes called shopbots. Shopbots is an ‗automated tool that permits customers to easily search for prices and product characteristics from different online retailers (Smith, 2002). 

The growth of this Internet price search tools, notably the shopbots, has reduced consumers‘ search costs for price and some product characteristics. While a variety of analytic models predict that increased consumer search through shopbots will lower price levels among competing retailers, though there is no consensus in the empirical literature as to whether price dispersion will increase or decrease in response to increased consumer search through shopbots (Tang, et al., 2007). Again, it was shown that market observers predicted benefits consumers stand to enjoy at the expense of retailers. Hence, shopbots will radically reduce consumer search costs and as well reduce retailer‘s opportunity to differentiate their products. This will in turn lower down the margins of retailers to zero. However, it was suggested that retailers still have several opportunity to differentiate their products, leverage brand names, peg strategic prices, and reduce the effectiveness of consumers search af shopbots (Smith, 2002). The applications do not just stop at listing products, they also enable the prospective consumer to buy the required product and pay for them.Again, the semantic web has technologies such as eXtensible Markup Language (XML), Resource Description Framework (RDF), Resource Description Framework Schema (RDFS), Ontology Web Language (OWL), and Ontology Web Language 2 (OWL2) which gives datasets of specific ontology that can be queried across the net by machines or intelligent agents, as such giving the necessary information to its assessors. Applications developers for e-commerce or electronic markets have been making use of these different patterns of representing datasets that has to do with the information about the goods or services of which they seek to convey and as well sell to their prospective consumers. Among all these technologies, XML was the first on line that enabled developers to organize data around tags that are well formed or well nested based on a rule written in Document Type Definitions (DTDs) or XML Schema. This feature of the XML marks it out as the main catalyst of e-Business as rightly noted in a dissertation work (Willaert, 2001). Then in order of advancement the RDF is next after XML. Resource Description Framework (RDF) is often seen as a data model in which data is represented in object-attribute-value pattern called a statement. RDF has been given XML syntax and it is domain independent- that is, its applicability covers any real world domain. But users of RDF may choose to define their own terminology by using a schema called RDF Schema (RDFS). RDF/RDFS enabled us to model particular domains such as the products/services a store is willing to put online for sale. Another language for modeling concepts is the Ontology Web Language (OWL). The semantic web has very great benefits for business, though these benefits have some weaknesses that are defined in the Linked Data Design Noted by Tim Berners-Lee in 2006 (Hart and Dolber, 2013). By making public business data as Linked Data, business organizations do not only make their products or services more findable in an objective fashion, but they provide a platform for other computer systems to read the exposed data. Exposing data as linked data becomes an exciting marketing technique (Lewis, 2008). Agents are now able to follow one node to another across the global giant graph. This change led to the Semantic web being ‗revisited‘ (Shadbolt et al., 2006) and ‗rebooted‘ by Cyganiak in 2008 (Smith, 2002). Some of these agents are termed as web crawlers. These agents can traverse several datasets retrieving data and putting data into a piece of document for a user.

Some possible applications of semantic web and agents could be in the area of a personal agent that uses formal semantic web knowledge bases to book holidays or even doctor‘s appointment as thought of by Tim Berners-Lee (Antoniou and Frank, 2004) during their creation of semantic web, a multi-agent system that is capable of acting in this own community to build and maintain additional Linked Data sets.

MSC Project Topics and Complete Thesis in Computer Science

AN IMPROVED SEMANTIC WEB-BASED SEARCH MODEL FOR E-COMMERCE USING OWL2

Department: Computer Science (M.Sc)

Format: MS Word

Chapters: 1 - 5, Preliminary Pages, Abstract, References, Appendix.

No. of Pages: 82

NB: The Complete Thesis is well written and ready to use. 

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