Research on Modelling Customer Ontology under CRM Framework

Information sharing within enterprise wide is regarded as one of important tools to gain the competitive advantage, especially under the business strategy of customer relationship management (abbr. CRM). However people are often confused by same conception with different name or title in same or different context when discussing something about business. Therefore a bridge for information understanding and sharing based on the semantic relation is desired to help people form unique conception when the same thing is referred. Ontology as a new mechanism of information sharing in the field of information system and artificial intelligent is just this bridge and has been generally studied in recent years to unify the conception and termination for some domain. The paper attempts to explain how the customer ontology, one of the domain ontology, works in CRM. By doing so a detailed process including four steps according to UML methodology is firstly introduced to find out the concepts and terms relevant to customer in CRM as many as possible by brainstorm. And then meta-terms with five elements are introduced to explain and define the concepts and terms in order to facilitate formalization of them. Next description logic, a tool of artificial intelligent, is employed to formulate the concepts and terms according to the customer ontology with seven meta-elements. Meanwhile some formalized examples of those concepts and terms are demonstrated to imply the feasibility of the mechanism. Finally the paper indicates the big potential application for customer ontology and also shows some directions to improve the availability of customer ontology.