Ontology-Based Intelligent Mobile Search Oriented to Global e-Commerce

In this paper we propose a novel approach for searching eCommerce products using a mobile phone, illustrated bya prototype eCoMobile. This approach aims to globalize the mobile search by integrating the concept of user multilinguisminto it. To illustrate that, we particularly deal with English and Arabic languages. Indeed the mobile user can formulate hisquery on a commercial product in either language (English/Arabic). The description of his information need on commercialproducts relies on the ontology that represents the conceptualization of the product catalogue knowledge domain defined inboth English and Arabic languages. A query expressed on a mobile device client defines the concept that corresponds to thename of the product followed by a set of pairs (property, value) specifying the characteristics of the product. Once a query issubmitted it is then communicated to the server side which analyses it and in its turn performs an http request to aneCommerce application server (like Amazon.com). This latter responds by returning an XML file representing a set ofelements where each element defines an item of the searched product with its specific characteristics. The XML file is analyzedon the server side and then items are displayed on the mobile device client along with its relevant characteristics in the chosenlanguage