Ontology for E-Business: a Semantic MultiLevel Approach

A crucial aspect for the e-business realm is that of finding and focusing on potentially new market segments, and managing relationships with customers (CRM, customer relationship management). To capture and understand customer needs effectively and subsequently transfer them into design specifications-product definition-is one of the essential premises for successful product design in today´s competitive global market. The main idea described in this paper is to combine business management research in the domain of business models with more technical and conceptual research in the domain of computer science, particularly ontologies. Un this paper we propose the use of the rigor, precision, more complete descriptions (e.g. constraints and rules) and reasoning of ontology to the concept of business models and, more in particular, for the products and their functionalities descriptions. The formalization of business model ontology provides the conceptual foundation for new methods and computer-based tools for such diverse fields. In particular this paper proposes a multilevel ontological approach in order to describe products both from the point of view of their components both from the point of view of their functionalities. In this way users can choose products using semantic queries.