knowledge · information · learning - Forschungszentrum L3S

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KNOWLEDGE
SemWeb – Semantic Web Technologies to Improve Customer Service
Managing Customer Requests Efficiently
A huge amount of service calls and mails reaches
enterprises every day. Reacting appropriately to
them and managing customers’ service needs
efficiently is a problem, especially in small and
medium-sized enterprises. The relevant knowledge
is often not stored in a retrievable form,
or only a few employees are capable of handling
the issues. It is often difficult for other
employees to discover this tacit knowledge and
Motivation
Customer care is a critical success factor in small and
medium-sized mechanical engineering companies. The
consumer’s preference for a particular producer is often
influenced by the level of customer services offered. People
working within the service department devote a significant
amount of time in searching for relevant information.
Even with existing retrieval systems, posing the “best”
request and receiving relevant results is still a challenge.
This is due to the numerous ways in which a question may
be posed when using natural language. The consequence
is repeated search for solutions to the same or similar problems
without the benefit of relevant, prior knowledge.
Furthermore, knowledge transfer among interdependent
departments is often a tedious process. An integrated solution,
such as the one proposed in the SemWeb project, fosters
an integrated service pipeline and seamlessly allows
the rapid propagation of product-specific knowledge and
an enhanced quality of service.
Challenges
Service messages are documented in natural language
and are therefore stored in an unstandardized, unstructured
manner. To allow efficient access and reuse of this
data, service messages have to be stored in a standardized
way and the underlying semantics have to be extracted.
Different expressions and synonyms need to be mapped
to the same semantic concepts, and concepts need to be
FORSCHUNGSZENTRUM L3S L3S RESEARCH CENTER
to overcome the learning curve associated with
acquiring such knowledge. Within the SemWeb
project, solutions are being developed to manage
service calls using Semantic Web technologies.
The objective is to allow employees to
effectively find similar requests, allow efficient
access to the database of service data and store
all the knowledge they create.
The objective of the SemWeb project is the implementation
of a system to improve the quality of
technical support that is suitable in particular for
small and medium-sized enterprises. Terms that
are relevant for this particular domain are identified
in service messages based on a thesaurus
describing the engineering domain. In this way,
similar messages can be discovered even if different
terms were used to describe similar issues.
Based on dependency information between single
terms (hypernomy, hyponymy), we create hierarchical
facets representing the content of ex-isting
service messages in a database. This allows
for browsing the message data-base in an intuitive
manner.
mapped to super-concepts to connect all service messages
to a semantic network. This leads to vastly improved
search mechanisms as well as improved maintainability of
data and knowledge.
Highlights
The current work in the SemWeb project exploits a thesaurus
of terms describing the domain of engineering. We
map service messages from enterprises to concepts of this
thesaurus. In this way, the service requests become compa-