Building Product Catalogues on the Semantic Web

In this paper we describe a prototype implementation of an ontology repository that captures the concepts in the Ontology Web Language OWL. We describe how these concepts can be used directly by embedding them in standard HTML pages and thus augmenting traditional product catalogues with semanti-cally rich information by means of RDFa. As an addition to the ISO part 12006-3, where such a mechanism is not specified explicitly, we propose a way to instantiate actual products, their types and attributes through an instance-of relationship. Building upon the rich family of Semantic Web standards such as SPARQL and RDFa, we demonstrate how information in building product catalogues can be made machine-accessible in more efficient and generic ways. Using the Open Source persistency frameworks we demonstrate how real-world products can be linked to 13,000+ concepts with some 44,000 names in different languages in efficient ways.