Improving Product Configurator by the use of Ontology and Slow Intelligence System Approach

Mass customization is one of the most interesting and promising approach in the e-business field. In today's competitive global market the understanding of customer needs is becoming the essential preliminary remark for a successful design and implementation of products. In fact the ability to create customized product configurations fulfilling user’s needs is a major aim sought by many companies, especially the design and implementation of web-based services that allows users to create and customize in a simple and intuitive way a desired product. To define a common vocabulary that opens possibilities such as the ability to express customer requirements correctly and to exchange knowledge, a popular approach uses ontological formalisms. Ontology, in fact, is a key factor for enabling interoperability across heterogeneous systems, services and users. Different users, however, usually represent the same knowledge domain by the use of different ontologies that can differ in structure, concepts, relations and attributes. Therefore, ontology could lose its main feature: allowing the semantic interoperability among actors working on the same knowledge domain. An effective solution to this problem is the introduction of methods for finding mapping among the various components of ontologies. This paper presents an ontology-based configurator system that maximally satisfies user’s needs starting from the desired requirements, the available components, the context information and previous similar configurations.