Ontology integration in a multilingual e-retail system.

The advent of e-commerce and the continuous growth of the WWW led to a new generation of e- retail stores. A number of commercial agent-based systems have been developed to help Internet shoppers decide what to buy and where to buy it from. In such systems, ontologies play a crucial role in supporting the exchange of business data, as they provide a formal vocabulary for the information and unify different views of a domain in a safe cognitive approach. Based on this assumption, inside CROSSMARC (a European research project supporting development of an agent-based multilingual information extraction system from web pages), an ontology architecture has been developed in order to organize the information provided by different resources in several languages. CROSSMARC ontology aims to support all the different activities carried on by the system's agents. The ontological architecture is based on three different layers: (1) a meta-layer that represents the common semantics that will be used by the different system's components in their reasoning activities, (2) a conceptual layer where the relevant concepts in each domain are represented and (3) a linguistic layer where language dependent realizations of such concepts are organized. This approach has been defined to enable rapid adaptation into different domains and languages.