Semantic Web Techniques for Yellow Page Service Providers

Applications providing "yellow pages information" for use over the web should ideally be based on structured information. Use of web pages providing unstructured information poses variety of problems to the user, such as use of arbitrary formats, unsuitability for machine processing and likely incompleteness of information. Structured data alleviates these problems but it require more. Capturing the semantics of a domain in the form of an ontology is necessary to ensure that unforeseen application can easily be created at a later date. The authors believe that the technology can be applied in many contexts in addition to yellow page systems. The essential features are the involvement of a set of creators of information and a set of end-users, the two sets not being mutually exclusive and the use of an ontology that can span a number of domains in the context of product and service vendors.