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In the paper educational resources are treated as regular digital products. The problem of the production, distribution and sale is addressed, especially concentrating on the production effort, cost and price. An original method of estimating development effort of e-learning resources is described and experimental results are presented. The paper presents also two extensions of the existing structure and implementation of learning objects. The structure of a learning object, although flexible, focuses on reuse, which is insufficient for independent learning. Therefore the first extension is the concept of a teaching object that contains all parts of the educational process, from knowledge presentation, through examples and exercises to final examinations. A teaching object is proposed as an independent subject of sale. Addition of data access methods to learning objects is the second proposed extension that creates a learning component. A model of learning object distribution based on Web services and learning components is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secure multicasting is one of the most efficient ways of delivering electronic content like streaming mutimedia to a group of users. One of the biggest challenges in secure multicasting is distributing group keys to the multicast group and managing the same. Although researchers have addressed the problem before, none of them address the fact that multicasting is an unreliable process. Thus there is no gurantee that the group key, distributed via multicasting, will be available in its correct form at the receiver. In this paper we propose a reliable and secure content distribution scheme that uses multicasting. The scheme uses an asymmetric multicast group key that is generated using parameters publicly available to all members of the group. The group key is used to encrypt a session key which is then distributed piggybacked on the multicast stream. The encrypted session key is dispersed over the stream in such a manner that receipt of a finite number of fragments of the session key ensures that the session key can be correctly recreated at the receiving end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the reasons for the failure of PKI in b2c e-commerce might be that too much effort was put in entity authentication. In many applications it is not necessary to know who an entity actually is, but to be sure that he/she possesses the proper rights to perform the desired action. This is exactly the purpose of Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructures (AAIs). Today several proposals and running AAIs are available focusing on different aspects. The purpose of this paper is firstly to introduce common representatives and to discuss their focus, secondly to develop criteria and requirements that any AAI for b2c e-commerce has to fulfil and finally evaluate the proposals against the developed criteria. Candidates for evaluation are Kerberos, SESAME, PERMIS, AKENTI, Microsoft Passport, Shibboleth and the Liberty Framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Service discovery middleware allows users to find and use services through service discovery protocols in heterogeneous and ubiquitous environments without previous knowledge of the specific service location or characteristics, and with minimum manual effort. For this reason, in recent years, a number of researchers have studied service discovery middleware and many of papers dealing with this field have been published. However, when a number of service consumers request services from middle agents (e.g. matchmaker, broker, yellow page, blackboard, lookup server, etc) within the service discovery middleware, the middle agents do not guarantee efficient and rapid matching results because they use only a simple matching algorithm based on set theory for match processing. In this paper we address issues of existing matching algorithms, and propose a new matchmaking method adopting the marriage matching algorithm of the ATM network [1] to improve middle agent performance, complementing shortcomings of the existing matching algorithms. Furthermore, we use traffic type (e.g. voice/video applications, data-sharing applications, convenience applications, and so on) priority information for providing application-oriented QoS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a novel protocol which supports information exchange in a decentralized, distributed environment, which brings flexibility and extensibility to the communication and invocations among remote hosts. However, SOAP requires a high performance for collaboration such as service delivery and invocation. Furthermore, SOAP itself is not well suitable for mobile devices due to network bandwidth or resource-constraints problems. In this paper, we describe SOAP-based remote data access scheme which is comprised of XML and RPC technology. Especially, we focus on the scheme which is optimal over service discovery and invocation based on SOAP technology. Also, we apply the proposed scheme to LSD (Lightweight Service Discovery) which is a peer-to-peer, cache-based service discovery protocol for ad hoc environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe a methodology for assembling composite services based on three basic processes which are independent of the concrete implementation: Service Abstraction Process, Service Composition Process, and Translation Process. These processes share the concept of integrated component composed of two key aspects: a specific set of the Aalst's workflow patterns together with a component-style composition of complex services. We propose a novel approach that implements the steps of such methodology, providing an efficient manner for developing service compositions and enhancing the expressiveness of target composition languages like BPEL4WS. Here we focus on the description of the Service Abstraction Process, a critical step in order to enhance the service composition by facilitating the reuse of existing services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web service providers specify access control policies to restrict access to their Web services. It turned out, that since the Web is an open, distributed and dynamic environment, in which a central controlling instance cannot be assumed, capability based access control is most suitable for this purpose. However, since practically every participant can certify capabilities defined in his/her own terminology, determining the semantics of certified capabilities and the trustworthiness of certification authorities are two major challenges in such a setting. In this paper, we show, (1) how certification authorities and their certification policies can be modeled semantically (2) how Web service providers can specify and check the consistency of their access control policies and (3) how end users can check automatically, whether they have access to a Web service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MiddLog is an extensible and configurable logging framework based on middleware technologies that exposes its services as web services, allowing its users to send log information as SOAP messages. It includes a set of components that are deployed on an application server, performing analysis and recordings of application events at a log file, in a dynamic and transparent way. MiddLog extension capability enables developers to augment its services by aggregating new features or creating new components and inserting them into its infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile grid, or wireless grid services refers to value-added grid service by processing in mobile environment. Besides mobile internet the traditional Internet computing is experiencing a conceptual shift from client-server model to grid and peer-to-peer computing models. As these trends, mobile internet and the grid, are likely to find each other the resource constraints that wireless devices pose today affect the level of interoperability between them. The goal of this paper is to investigate how well the most limited wireless devices can make use of grid security services. This paper describes a novel security approach on fast mobile grid services based on current mobile web services platform environment using XML signcryption mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We suggest a service framework and algorithms of provisioning healthcare services in a ubiquitous computing environment. In order to meet customers' need we translate the need into relevant goal and repeatedly refine the goal into sub-goals through commonsense knowledge until there are appropriate services for sub-goals and after, employ the services. The results of this research enable integration and interconnection of devices, applications, and functions within the healthcare services. By RDFSs and their interoperability, a ubiquitous healthcare service composition is achieved, and the hidden semantic distances can be measured dynamically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the importance of ‘private cyber coins' to the growth of efficiency in electronic commerce. ‘Private cyber coins' such as portal cash, game money, and mileage point are new tokens issued by private companies including Internet portals. It is argued that private cyber coins have encouraged the efficiency in electronic commerce. The paper suggests that monetary freedom theory can be used to inform our understanding of the role of private cyber coins to the growth of efficiency. We suggest that private cyber coins are an essential element to the growth of efficiency through creating value and building relationship between entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E-commerce customers may have a problem when paying for the purchase of a major item, if its price is larger than the available credit on their credit card. In the brick and mortar world, this problem would be solved by paying part of the bill with cash or with a second credit card. In e-commerce, however, this has not been an option. Furthermore, even when a customer could pay the whole purchase with one of her credit cards, she may prefer to first max out another card with a lower interest rate. The overall goal of this research is to provide customers with the capability of customizing their payments by splitting an e-commerce payment over multiple cards, while taking into account a set of competing preferences over policies and constraints of various cards in determining which cards to use. This paper presents an intelligent card management agent, called Fuzzy Virtual Card Agent (f-VA) that supports the customer's divisible payment decision. By modeling the customer's preferences using weighted fuzzy set memberships, the f-VA considers the preferences over the card issuers' policies, such as credit limits, interest rates and many others as well as the policies imposed by the secondary issuers, such as employers, and suggests the best combination of cards to the customer. The customer can take advantage of the suggestion by the f-VA or modify it immediately on the Web. Our approach provides customers with a more flexible card payment method for online purchases and can be extended to any types of purchases, such as mobile commerce payments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we introduce a new prediction method for multimedia content preference. Unlike typical methods, our method considers the trend of a TV viewer's preference change for estimating the statistical future preference using the moving average technique (MAT). With developing the statistical expression of the MAT based on a Bayesian network, experiments were implemented for predicting the TV genre preference using 2,400 TV viewers' watching history and showed that the performance of our method is better than that of the typical method if the window size in the MAT is large enough to reflect a user's preference changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web Usage Mining (WUM) aims to extract navigation usage patterns from Web server logs. Mining algorithms yield usage patterns, but finding the ones that constitute new and interesting knowledge in the domain remains a challenge. Typically, analysts have to deal with a huge volume of pattern, from which they have to retrieve the potentially interesting one and interpret what they reveal about the domain. In this paper, we discuss the filtering mechanisms of O3R, an environment supporting the retrieval and interpretation of sequential navigation patterns. All O3R functionality is based on the availability of the domain ontology, which dynamically provides meaning to URLs. The analyst uses ontology concepts to define filters, which can be applied according to two filtering mechanisms: equivalence and similarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The performance and quality of a web service are important factors and are expected by parties utilizing the service. This paper proposes and implements a cost efficiency solution to cater for web services in a unique set of situation. The solution is designed for web services that have frequent user groups scattered in various geographic locations, without the existence of access patterns. This optimization solution is developed for the Fluid Infrastructure methodology. Its main emphasis is fundamentally to provide a mechanism that is capable of reacting to various problems (operational and performance related) in an efficient and autonomous manner. Discussions within this paper focus on the algorithms that are used to compute the efficiency metrics and implementation issues of the solution. Further, evaluation of these solutions are also demonstrated and validated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most existing distributed Web systems, incoming requests are distributed to servers via Domain Name System (DNS). Although such systems are simple to implement, the address caching mechanism easily results in load unbalancing among servers. Moreover, modi.cation of the DNS is necessary to load balancing considering the server's state. In this paper, we propose a new dynamic load balancing method using dynamic DNS update and round-robin mechanism. The proposed method performs effective load balancing without modi.cation of the DNS. In this method, a server is dynamically added to or removed from the DNS list according to the server's load. By removing the overloaded servers from the DNS list, the response time becomes faster. For dynamic scheduling, the scheduling algorithm consider usage rates of servers' three main resources-CPU, memory, and network. We also implement a GUI-based management tool to manage the system across the network. Experiments show that modules implemented in this paper have a low impact on performance of the proposed system. Furthermore, experiments show that both the response time and the average file transfer rate of the proposed system are faster than those of a pure Round-Robin DNS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Web continues to grow at a tremendous rate. Search engines find it increasingly difficult to provide useful results. To manage this explosively large number of Web documents, automatic clustering of documents and organising them into domain dependent directories became very popular. In most cases, these directories represent a hierarchical structure of categories and sub-categories for domains and sub-domains. To fill up these directories with instances, individual documents are automatically analysed and placed into them according to their relevance. Though individual documents in these collections may not be ranked efficiently, combinedly they provide an excellent knowledge source for facilitating ontology construction in that domain. In (mainly automatic) ontology construction steps, we need to find and use relevant knowledge for a particular subject or term. News documents provide excellent relevant and up-to-date knowledge source. In this paper, we focus our attention in building business ontologies. To do that we use news documents from business domains to get an up-to-date knowledge about a particular company. To extract this knowledge in the form of important "terms" related to the company, we apply a novel method to find "related terms" given the company name. We show by examples that our technique can be successfully used to find "related terms" in similar cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research has designed and developed an integrated supply chain management (SCM) system for optimizing inventory control and reducing material handling costs of pharmaceutical products in healthcare sector. The supply chain in this work is composed of pharmaceutical companies, a wholesaler, and hospitals. At first, we have analyzed hospital's business processes and reviewed system requirements for the efficient supply chain management. VMI (Vendor-Managed Inventory), which is one of important applications of SCM, has been adopted and implemented to improve material handling efficiency. Online procurement system is also developed for the departments that consume drugs and place orders. Besides, real time information sharing functionalities are provided for optimizing inventory control of pharmaceuticals. The developed SCM system enables hospitals to improve the procurement processes and inventory control of pharmaceutical products, which results in decreasing total inventory more than 30%. By sharing information with hospitals, the wholesaler can gather more timely and exact data about inventory status and drug usage volumes of hospitals, so it can forecast the demand more accurately, which enables needed products to be supplied timely and cost-effectively. With the SCM system, total supply chain cost of pharmaceutical products has been decreased significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semantic Web Services can be seen as remote Problem Solving Methods offered via the Web through platform and language independent interfaces. They can be seamlessly integrated to achieve more complex functionality by composing pre-existing software components. Despite technical advantages surrounding Semantic Web Services technologies, their perspective overlooks the commercial aspects of services in the real - non-IT - world, and is therefore incomplete and limiting. Real-world services - business activities such as insurances, medical services, ADSL etc - have nowadays an increasing social and economic importance. Important trends are the bundling of services and a growing customer-need orientation. Thus, there is a need for a computational background for describing real-world services and applying knowledge-based technologies for reasoning about them: configuring composite services and analysing them from a business perspective. We have developed ontologies and software tools to fill this gap, and applied them to industrial case studies. We present here a case study from the music industry, going from the analysis of a new business scenario to the development of an application called Xena that coordinates IT infrastructures in order to provide a profitable service that reflects major business principles. As opposed to currently proposed solutions in the Semantic Web Services community, our system is an automated implementation of a real-world service where important business decisions can be traced back. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commonly held perceptions (including the ones reflected in the Call for Papers for this EC-Web 2005 Conference) are 1) that the Internet is changing the way companies and organizations are working, 2) that the amount of innovation and change seems to accelerate, and 3) that further development is constrained by numerous technical issues that still need to be resolved. Preliminary analysis of developments in the websites of 120 companies from 8 industry sectors across two countries over a period of five years from 2000 - 2004 challenges these perceptions. The websites were analysed by means of a framework with 30 evaluation criteria developed from theory and leading examples of web-applications across a broad range of web-sites in Asia-Pacific, Europe and North-America. This major international study suggests that: the impact of e-business on companies and organizations differs between sectors; the rate of innovation and change does not reflect constant improvement but in some cases exhibits degraded web-capabilities over time; and that the major challenges constraining further development may be more managerial than technical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To manage the quality of services, internal business processes should be managed as like the intermediate products are controlled for quality of final products in the manufacturing industry. The business process management (BPM) with the aim of improving processes requires both analysis and evaluation of practices. Till now, while the transactional data such as total sales are sufficiently analyzed, Customers' responses on the business processes are not considered. In this paper, we introduce the voice of the customers (VOC) as a data source for BPM in the service industry. We suggest a VOC management framework that acquires data about business processes performance and quality of services. A consequent data model and business process model are followed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Values have been noted as integral elements of an electronic business model (BM) while value creation has been considered as a central strategic task in e-business planning. It has also been suggested that performance measurement and strategic management should focus on the value creation process. In recent years, the balanced scorecard (BSC) has evolved to become a dominant strategic management mechanism and has been widely adopted in business sectors. However, a gap between BM and the BSC still hinders the usefulness and effectiveness of applying the BSC to the e-business domain. This paper aims at providing an integrated framework for linking the BSC to e-business models through identified values and strategies to facilitate strategic management activities. Value dimensions identified include market, supply chain, customer, enterprise, and product and service, and therefore the adapted value-based BSC framework contains market, supply chain, customer, as well as business structure and process as balanced perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In agent-mediated electronic markets, an agent may delegate part of the assigned tasks to other agents to achieve the business objectives via establishment of contracts. Electronic contracting relies on an effective model to automate the negotiation processes and analyze the feasibility of the resulting contracts. In this paper, we concentrated on automated negotiation mechanism in contract manufacturing supply chains. Contract manufacturing has been widely accepted in many industries. Time and cost are two significant factors to be negotiated in contract manufacturing. Formation of contract manufacturing supply chain networks is based on the contract orders and tends to be more dynamic than ever to accommodate the fast changing innovative technologies, products and customers' preference. Optimization of such contract manufacturing supply chain networks usually relies on coordination among the trading partners and is much more difficult than traditional production networks. The objectives of this paper are to propose a framework to model the negotiation processes in contract manufacturing, analyze the feasibility of the contracts and optimize contract awarding based on the proposed model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses a new class of formal languages called standard K-languages (SK-languages) as a powerful tool for building contracts concluded by computer intelligent agents and representing contents of arbitrary e-negotiations. The definition of SK-languages is a part of a mathematical model describing a system consisting of such 10 operations on structured meanings (SMs) of natural language texts (NL-texts) that, using primitive conceptual items as "blocks", it is possible to build SMs of, probably, arbitrary NL-texts. This means that a class of languages is determined being convenient for building semantic descriptions of arbitrary goods, services, and contracts. The principal advantages of SK-languages in comparison with first-order logic, Discourse Representation Theory, Theory of Conceptual Graphs, and Episodic Logic concern representing complicated goals and destinations of things, definitions of concepts, compound definitions of sets, and meanings of discourses with the references to the meaning of a phrase or larger part of discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electronic Institution are regulated environments populated by autonomous software agents that perform tasks on behalf of users. Users, however, are reluctant in delegating full control of critical decisions to agents and prefer to make them on their own. In order to increase trust in agents we propose 3D Electronic Institutions as an environment inhabited by a heterogenous society of humans and agents. We present a novel approach that introduces humans to Electronic Institutions via 3D Virtual Worlds. Such a 3D Virtual World provides an immersive user interface that allows humans to observe the behavior of their agents as well as the intervention in the agents' decision process if necessary. We step beyond the agents view on Electronic Institutions, take a human-centered perspective and concentrate on the relation between humans and agents in the amalgamation of 3D Electronic Institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests Knowledge Management System(KMS) using E-mail. When KMS is constructed through E-mail, the cost of service construction and the education of users are almost unnecessary. We use user profile in order to provide Automatic Knowledge Recommending System(AKRS) based on user's preference. In addition, this paper proposes E-mail classification method and automatic knowledge recommending method. We conducted an experiment to evaluate AKRS effectiveness of these methods. From the result of the experiment, we draw conclusions that user can use easily knowledge without special search. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduce a new problem which we call as Online Probabilistic Weighted Bipartite Graph Matching. Consider a weighted bipartite graph with a source node set, a target node set, an edge set and a set of weights for the edges. The source nodes arrive in an online fashion based on a stochastic process. When a source node arrives, it needs to be matched with a target node before the arrival of next source node. Since the arrival process is stochastic, all the source nodes need not arrive and their order of arrival is also not known a priori. The objective is to match the arriving source node with a target node such that the expected sum of weights of the matching over the arrival process is maximized. We present some heuristics that perform well for this problem. We demonstrate the application of our formulation for session based recommendation [5]. Here the source nodes correspond to the web pages, the target nodes correspond to the advertisement that can be shown and the edge weights correspond to the revenue generated by showing the given advertisement on the given web page. The user traversal of web pages corresponds to the arrival process of the source nodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To deal with the image recommending problems in P2P systems, this paper proposes a PeerCF-CB (Peer oriented Collaborative Filtering recommendation methodology using Contents-Based filtering). PeerCF-CB uses recent ratings of peers to adopt a change in peer preferences, and searches for nearest peers with similar preference through peer-based local information only. The performance of PeerCF-CB is evaluated with real transaction data in S content provider. Our experimental result shows that PeerCF-CB offers not only remarkably higher quality of recommendations but also dramatically faster performance than the centralized collaborative filtering recommendation systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a new paradigm for integrating distributed software, especially e-Business application. It is essential to exchange reliable data between services. In this paper, we propose a methodology for detecting and cleansing dirty data between services, which is different from cleansing static and large data on database systems. We also develop a data cleansing service based on SOA. The service for cleansing interacting data makes it possible to improve the quality of services and to manage data effectively for a variety of SOA-based applications. As an empirical study, we applied this service to clean dirty data between CRM and ERP services and showed that the dirty data rate could be reduced by more than 30%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Caméléon# is a web data extraction and management tool that provides information aggregation with advanced capabilities that are useful for developing value-added applications and services for electronic business and electronic commerce. To illustrate its features, we use an airfare aggregation example that collects data from eight online sites, including Travelocity, Orbitz, and Expedia. This paper covers the integration of Caméléon# with commercial database management systems, such as MS SQL Server, and XML query languages, such as XQuery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the development of E-commerce applications several decisions must be taken to provide the information, functionality and navigation that better fills to the commercial needs of an organization. These decisions define the requirements that an E-commerce application must satisfy. Although there are a significant number of proposals for modelling and developing E-commerce applications, very few of them clearly state how to elicit and represent E-commerce requirements, and how to go from the requirements specification to the Web conceptual model with a sound methodological basis. This work presents an approach to capture E-commerce application requirements by means of: (1) the identification of the tasks that users must be able to achieve and (2) the description of these tasks from the point of view of the interaction that the user requires of the web application. In addition, we show how the web conceptual model of the OOWS method can be systematically derived from a task description. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many approaches have been developed for modeling the functional aspects of Web applications, but there is a lack of a modeling language for their architectural concerns. This paper proposes such a modeling language defined as a UML 2.0 profile, which allows the specification of domain-specific models for the architectural view of Web applications. The profile is part of the Web Software Architecture (WebSA) approach, which follows the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) principles. The modeling elements proposed for each WebSA model (subsystem, configuration and integration models) are both represented graphically and formalized by means of the profile and the metamodel, respectively. In this article we will focus on the Configuration model and how it is used to model the well-known Petstore example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with Workflow Web Services (W2S). By W2S, we mean services automating business processes, and whose description and execution are accessible through the Web. In a first step, we use the Petri Net with Objects (PNO) formalism to graphically and formally model W2S, and then, in a second step, we provide rules to derive OWL-S specifications from PNO specifications automatically. The two main advantages of our approach are, first, to ease the design, the simulation and the verification of a workflow service thanks to PNO, and second, to publish it thanks to OWL-S, which is a semantic Web service description language. Consequently, PNO can be seen as a formalism providing an operational semantic to OWL-S since it defines formal and executable specifications to analyze, simulate, check and validate OWL-S specifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an approach for determining clusters of customer agents having both similar interests and buying behaviour. On the one hand, a seller can exploit such a clustering for improving its activities, e.g. for adapting the presentation of its Web Site or for proposing suitable offers to each agent cluster. On the other hand, a customer agent can realize with the other agents of its cluster various kinds of collaboration. In our approach, each agent is provided with an ontology that representing interests and behaviour of its human owner and the clustering technique we propose, that is performed at two levels of detail, is based on the extraction of semantic similarities between agent ontologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet-based e-commerce provides a high level of flexibility and openness though presenting many drawbacks due to the heterogeneity of the exchanged information. Ontologies are a key technology to solve many of the problems of e-commerce, in fact many companies use ontologies as a method of exchanging meaning between different agents. As ontology usage becomes more prevalent, the need for ontology reconciliation increases. In fact, ontology mapping methods can contribute to solve the problem of knowledge communication and interchange. In this paper we present an automatic method for ontology mapping. The method is made up of two phases: a lexical-semantic analysis based on the WordNet thesaurus and a structural analysis based on a matching algorithm that finds semantic mappings between two ontologies expressed in Attributive Language with Number description () Description logic. The mapped ontologies describe the same conceptualization through a set of rules that join related concepts. We deployed the proposed approach in a prototype system that currently is employed for large scale experiments. A simple experiment with a case study domain has shown a good correspondence with human mapping manually conducted and the system provided results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ontology concerns with the nature and relations of being. Electronic catalog contains rich semantics associated with products, and serves as a challenging practical domain for ontology application. It is beneficial to model e-Catalogs based not only on the definition of each product class and the taxonomic hierarchy of classes but also on the associated semantic knowledge. Ontology can play an important role in e-Commerce as a formalization of e-Catalogs. However, an ontological modeling should not be technically too complicated to represent and comprehend the e-Catalog domain for a domain expert who has little knowledge in the formal language. In this paper, we present an ontological representation of e-Catalogs, which is both conceptual and formal. We take an Extended Entity Relationship approach to denote the fundamental set of modeling constructs, and present corresponding description logic representation for each construct. We also consider the modeling language to be reasonably practical with regard to its expressiveness and complexity. We illustrate sample e-Catalog modeling scenarios to demonstrate the practical feasibility of our modeling approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work describes a novel strategy for designing an XPath processor that acts over an RDF mapping of XML. We use a model-mapping approach to represent instances of XML and XML Schema in RDF. This representation retains the node order, in contrast with the usual structure-mapping approach. The processor can be fed with an unlimited set of XML schemas and/or RDFS/OWL ontologies. The queries are resolved taking into consideration the structural and semantic connections described in the schemas and ontologies. Such behavior, schema-awareness and semantic integration, can be useful for exploiting schema and ontology hierarchies in XPath queries. We test our approach in the Digital Rights Management (DRM) domain. We explore how the processor can be used in the two main rights expression languages (REL),: MPEG-21 REL and ODRL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]