Using Ontology to Represent Cultural Aspects of Local Products for Supporting Local Community Enterprise in Thailand

Abstract

Community enterprise plays an important role for developing local business. Products from local communities apply local specialties such as high-quality materials and inherited wisdom. This work aims to support merchandises from local community enterprises by bringing out their specialties related to local wisdom and intangible cultural aspects. An ontology is applied to demonstrate the innate information regarding the implicit values of the products and is used as a core for a semantic search system. Details of the products are gathered from their respective community using an interview method and are extracted to align with the developed ontological schema. The semantic search system thus is implemented with a recommendation process for online accessibility for providing the organised information. From evaluation, the developed ontology and its instances are rated highly for their consistency, conciseness, and completeness. In usage, accuracy of the query and recommendation results are evaluated at 97.38% searching accuracy and 85.03% for recommending interesting products.