Managing user interaction in an ontology-based system

In this paper, we present an approach to the management of user interaction within an ontology-based system. In particular, we discuss the case of ARNEIS, an “intelligent” web-based repository of software solutions, that enables software houses to upload a description of their software solutions for business automation, and small-to-medium sized enterprises to find software products or services supporting their activities. To this purpose, as argued in the paper, a particularly meaningful field is Customer Relationship Management, that is thus exploited as a test bed domain. The functionality of ARNEIS is based on an ontological representation of the domain knowledge, which represents the shared conceptual vocabulary to express software descriptions and technological requirements. In this paper we describe our proposal for the management of a user-friendly interaction enabling software houses to upload the semantic representation of the description of their offers. The approach we propose within the ARNEIS scenario represents an example of a more general solution to face the issue of how to build formal representations of resources in an ontology-based IR system.