Conceptual Modeling of Product Information in e-Commerce

A well developed product information repository is an important part of an e-Commerce system. Product information contains rich semantics associated with product attributes and the relationships between products. We have presented an ontological model of product information which is both conceptual and formal. We employed extended entity relationship as a structural anchor for the conceptual and pictorial representation of the formal model. In this paper, we illustrate modeling scenarios to demonstrate the practical feasibility of our modeling approach in the domain. In addition, we survey the recent works on conceptual modeling and ontological approaches of product information.