Educational advertising ontology: a domain-dependent ontology for semantic advertising networks

Ontologies play a major role in supporting information exchange processes in various areas (Fensel, 2001). Many definitions of Ontologies have been given in the last decade. Ontologies were best defined by (Gruber, 1993): Ontology is an explicit formal specifications of the terms in the domain and relations among them. Ontologies were developed in Artificial Intelligence to facilitate knowledge sharing and reuse. Recently the use of Ontologies moved from Artificial Intelligence laboratories to real-world applications.
Ontologies applied to the World Wide Web creating what is called the semantic web (Berners-Lee, 2000). General-purpose Ontologies were developed such as WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998) and UNSPSC (http://www.unspsc.org/). General-purpose Ontologies contain mistakes in specialized domains (McCrae and Collier, 2008), causing some researchers and applications to construct their own domain-specific Ontology. Many disciplines have developed standardized Ontologies where domain experts can use to share and annotate information in their fields, such as in Medicine SNOMED (Price and Spackman, 2000) and the semantic network of the Unified Medical Language System (Humphreys and Lindberg, 1993). Both general-purpose (domain-independent) and domain-dependent Ontologies served the same purpose, that is developing a common vocabulary for application to share information.
One of the main application areas of Ontology technology is Electronic Business (e-commerce). Ontologies have been used in e-commerce and by many providers such as Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/) and eBay (http://www.ebay.com/) for categorizations of products for sale and their features. Advertising networks represent the most sophisticated application of Internet database capabilities to date (Laudon and Traver, 2008). In advertising networks or ad networks, different advertisers need to extract information from different Web sites, called publishers. "Ad networks are companies that pay software developers as well as web sites money for allowing their ads to be shown when people use their software or visit their sites" (Wikipedia, 2009). In advertising networks, software agents are used to extract information to identify target publishers to publish their ads on (http://www.emarketer.com/). A common use of Ontologies is necessary for sharing common understanding of the structure of information among people or software agents (Musen, 1992; Gruber, 1993).