Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

5-2002

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. 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

Keywords

Electronic commerce, product description, relational schema, schema integration

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | E-Commerce | Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing

Research Areas

Data Science and Engineering

Publication

IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering

Volume

14

Issue

3

First Page

583

Last Page

598

ISSN

1041-4347

Identifier

10.1109/TKDE.2002.1000344

Publisher

IEEE

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2002.1000344

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