Productpedia – A Collaborative Electronic Product Catalog for Ecommerce 3.0

Despite the advancements made in ecommerce technologies over the past years, the inability to define and exchange semantically rich and accurate product information among ecommerce websites/applications has continued to intrigue researchers. This problem has taken on greater urgency because it impedes the realization of the full benefits of Ecommerce 3.0. The present research conceptualizes, designs and implements a cloud computing-based platform that enables global merchants to maintain a collaborative Electronic Product Catalog (EPC) known as Productpedia. This collaborative EPC platform addresses numerous shortcomings of prior researches by (1) maintaining a single centralized EPC database; (2) negating the need to synchronize and convert data; (3) creating an integrated meta-model ontology for merchants to define previously unclassified product information without the involvement of domain experts; and (4) enabling an Open Application Programming Interface based on RESTful web services to facilitate direct modification of the EPC database by even third-party applications.