Very good news today since our paper, "Explorations in the use of Semantic Web Technologies for Product Information Management", was accepted at WWW 2007 , one the most important international conference about web technologies. For several years this conference has given a special place to Semantic Web and its applications. Our paper is in line with this important evolution of the web and addresses these techniques in some real use cases: the Master Data management and in particular, the Product Information Management.

I would like to thank all my teammates for their efforts and comments to achieve this paper in term of quality and deadline.

See below the abstract of this paper.

Master data is core business entities a company uses repeatedly across many business processes and systems (such as lists or hierarchies of customers, suppliers, accounts, products, or organizational units). Product information is the most important kind of master data and product information management (PIM) is becoming critical for modern enterprises because it provides a richer business context for various applications. Existing PIM systems are less flexible and scalable for on-demand business, as well as weak to completely capture and use the semantics of master data. This paper explores how to use semantic web technologies to enhance a collaborative PIM system by simplifying modelling and representation while preserving enough dynamic flexibility. Furthermore, we build a semantic PIM system using one of the state-of-art ontology repositories and summarize encountered challenges based on our experimental results, especially on performance and scalability. We believe that our study and experiences are valuable for both semantic web community and master data management community.