¹ School of Management, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, P.R.China, 430081
² Center for Studies of Information Resources, Wuhan University, Wuhan, P.R. China, 430072

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Abstract—With the progress of economic globalization and the coming of knowledge economy, customers have become valuable resources grabbed by enterprises. How to retain old customers and obtain new customers is the main content and purpose of Customer Knowledge Management (CKM). Following the introduction in section 1, we analyze the need for ontology building in implementing CKM strategy considering that customer knowledge could be understood and processed by machine automatically in section 2. In section 3, we discuss Web ontology languages. In section 4, we design an ontology framework for CKM. In the framework, there exist many semantic relations that could be expressed using OWL (Ontology Web Language). In section 5, we analyze the environment of Protégé 3.4.4 in which we develop the ontology based on the framework. We elicit several paragraphs of source code as examples to show how OWL can represent the semantic relations of the ontology, i.e. cardinality restrictions, classes declared to be disjoint, Boolean combination, hasValue restrictions, enumeration class, and property definition.

Index Terms—customer knowledge management (CKM), ontology, OWL, framework, representation

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Cite: Yalan Yan and Xianjin Zha, " Applying OWL to Build Ontology for Customer Knowledge Management," Journal of Computers vol. 5, no. 11, pp. 1693-1699, 2010.