Dong Kyu Kim   Sang Goo Lee   Dong Hoon Choi

Vol. 12,  No. 1, pp. 165-178, Feb.  2005
10.3745/KIPSTD.2005.12.1.165

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A product classification scheme is the foundation on which product databases are designed, and plays a central role in almost all aspects of management and use of product information. It needs to meet diverse user views to support efficient and convenient use of product information. It needs to be changed and evolved very often without breaking consistency in the cases of introduction of new products, extinction of existing products, class reorganization, and class specialization. It also needs to be merged and mapped with other classification schemes without information loss when B2B transactions occur. For these requirements, a classification scheme should be so dynamic that it takes in them within right time and cost. The existing classification schemes widely used today such as UNSPSC and eCl@ss, however, have a lot of limitations to meet these requirements for dynamic features of classification. Product information implies a plenty of semantics such as class attributes like material, time, place, etc., and integrity constraints. In this paper, we analyze the dynamic features of product databases and the limitation of existing code based classification schemes, and describe the semantic classification model proposed in [1], which satisfies the requirements for dynamic features of product databases. It provides a means to explicitly and formally express more semantics for product classes and organizes class relationships into a graph.