Ontologies and importance to E-Commerce
Simple ontologies (taxonomies) provide:
- Controlled shared vocabulary (search engines, authors, users, databases, programs/agents all speak same language)
- Organization (and navigation support)
- Expectation setting (left side of many web pages)
- Browsing support (tagged structures such as Yahoo!)
- Search support (query expansion approaches such as FindUR, e-Cyc)
- Sense disambiguation