Application of Fuzzy Ontology to Information Retrieval for Electronic Commerce

Ontology-based semantic retrieval is a hotspot of current research. In order to achieve fuzzy semantic retrieval, this paper applies a fuzzy ontology framework to information retrieval system in e-commerce. The framework includes three parts: concepts, properties of concepts and values of properties, in which propertypsilas value can be linguistic values of fuzzy concepts. The semantic query expansion is constructed by order relation, equivalence relation, inclusion relation, reversion relation and complement relation between fuzzy concepts defined in linguistic variable ontologies with resource description framework (RDF). The application to retrieve customer, product and supplier information shows that the framework can overcome the localization of other fuzzy ontology models, and this research facilitates the semantic retrieval of information through fuzzy concepts on the semantic Web.