Magnus Niemann, Malgorzata Mochol and Robert Tolksdorf

Abstract: Internet commerce experiences a rising complexity: Not only more and more products become available online but also the amount of information available to a single product has been constantly increasing. Thanks to the Web 2.0 development it is, in the meantime, quite common to involve customers in the creation of product description and extraction of additional product information by offering customers feedback forms and product review sites, users' weblogs and other social web services.

To face this situation, one of the main tasks in a future internet will be to aggregate, sort and evaluate this huge amount of information to aid the customers in choosing the "perfect" product for their needs. Semantic and Web 2.0 technologies support and facilitate the integration of heterogeneous data sources, exploitation of customer feedback, and utilization of available ontologies and vocabularies, which, in turn, allow vendors to enrich existing product information, improve the user's navigation in online catalogues and enhance customers' satisfaction. In this paper we elaborate some results of Aletheia -  a German leading innovation project for semantic federation of product information focusing on the usefulness of semantic technologies for B2C online commerce.