2002 ProductSchemaIntegrationforElec

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Subject Headings: Product Database Schema Integration, Product Data Record Canonicalization.

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Cited By

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Author Keywords

Electronic commerce, product description, relational schema, schema integration

Abstract

In any electronic commerce system, the heterogeneity of product descriptions is a critical impediment to efficient business information exchange. In the ABECOS electronic commerce system, buyer agents, seller agents, and directory agents liaise with one another in e-commerce activities. Only when agents have a common ontology of product descriptions (also called product schemas) are they able to interact seamlessly in e-commerce activities. This gives rise to the Product Schema Integration problem (PSI); the problem of integrating heterogeneous schemas of a certain product into one globally compatible schema. In this paper, we adopt an integration approach based on product attribute synonyms. We give a formal definition of the problem and show that it is NP-complete. We contrast our approach of study to conventional schema integration in federated databases. We also propose a set of approximate algorithms for PSI and evaluate their performance.

2. Related Work

2.1 Database Schema Integration

... There are three levels of information that can be used to determin the semantics of attributes: attributes names, attribute field specification, and attribute domains.

3. Problem Formulation

3.1 Synonym Set

We use synonym set to represent the metadata of product schemas. A synonym set is a set of alternative names for an attribute. These alternative names include synonyms, abbreviations, and acronyms for the attribute. It is different from value set, which is the domain (or set of possible values) of the attribute. For instance, (type, sort, category, calss) is a synonym set representing the real world conceptualization of the genre of a music CD, such as (rock, classical, jazz, country, Christian, R&B, misc). …

We say two synonym sets are semantically coherent if their intersection is not empty. Here, note that semantic coherence does not mean semantic equivalence; it only implies close semantic relationship. The size of the interaction of two synonym sets is an indicator of the degree of proximity between them. We observe that semantically coherent synonyms sets probably refer conceptually to the “same attribute." …

References

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 AuthorvolumeDate ValuetitletypejournaltitleUrldoinoteyear
2002 ProductSchemaIntegrationforElecEe-Peng Lim
Guanghao Yan
Wee Keong Ng
Product Schema Integration for Electronic Commerce-A Synonym Comparison Approach10.1109/TKDE.2002.1000344