An Ontology-Based Product Recommender System for B2B Marketplaces

An ontology-based product-recommender system can help catalog administrators in B2B marketplaces maintain up-to-date product databases by acquiring mapping information between the new product data and existing data. The proposed approach is keyword-based and independent of the underlying physical structure of product ontology. With a Bayesian belief network as its basis, the ranking algorithm utilizes semantics embedded within relationships defined in ontology to probabilistically determine the ranking scores. The methodology is implemented on a practical ontology system powerful enough to assist users in B2B marketplaces. Its effectiveness is demonstrated in comparison to the conventional search engines.