Constructing ontology for customer information in consumer support systems

For enterprises, customer relationships have been commonly recognized as a critical factor to succeed their business. Effective customer relationships could help enterprises deliver services to customers based on their needs, preferences, or past transactions. In this context, many discussions have already been presented where Consumer Support Systems (CSS) is most recently introduced that alleviates the shortcomings in other approaches by a 4-layer framework of collaborative mechanisms to support effective information/service provision between enterprises and customers. Since in CSS customers get used to participate in various communities to share or co-learn information about their experiences or requests on enterprises, a comprehensive structure for such information is therefore necessary for its easy sharing or co-learning among these customers. For this need and as a pristine way for knowledge-sharing by ontology, we present in this paper a method for the construction of an ontology that describes customer information with an easy understood structure. The method starts from the specification of the ontology based on the experiences of customers, through the browsing of their new ideas, and ends with the verification of its consistency. To illustrate, the method is applied in an exemplified application for travel arrangement.