Local Organization and Business Ontology (LOBO)

In the advent of globalization and increasing tourism local companies and business get more and more attention from people in different parts of the world. In this paper the authors outline an approach which leads to a description of organizations and business, i.e. non-profit and profit organizations, with an emphasis on local or regional basis. For this, publicly available upper ontologies and business area and e-tourism ontologies are studied and used as appropriate, added by an ontology describing the concepts of locality, forming a Local Organizations and Business Ontology system (LOBO). As an example the authors set up an ontology for organizations and enterprises in Phitsanulok Province (Thailand). The system aims at establishing web based dynamic yellow pages as well as company and organizational histories with the help of the semantic web. Therefore the authors do not only use a spatial (regional, local) but also a temporal ontology. The ontology is implemented with Protege (OWL).