Design of a Modular Ontology for South African Informal Sector Services

Abstract

AbstractThe high unemployment rate in South Africa has encouraged several types of informal occupational and business activities in the informal business sector of South Africa. Just like in many Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries, the South African informal sector has many challenges such as lack of organisation, poor regulation, poor service delivery, low capitalisation, and low productivity to contend with. Attempts have been made to address some of these challenges through the application of ICT. One of the proposed solutions is the use of electronic web portal technology to promote informal businesses and facilitate informal business transactions. However, to attain maximum impact, the platform must be enabled with artificial intelligence (AI) to create a system that can leverage the convergence of intelligent reasoning and semantic technology in tackling the challenges of the South African informal sector. In essence, such a web portal must possess capabilities such as semantic-based reasoning, semantic analysis of user queries, and intelligent recommendations, which require the existence of a dedicated domain ontology. In this paper, we present the conceptual design and prototype development of a modular ontology for the informal sector of South Africa.KeywordsInformal sectorKnowledge representationModular ontologyOntology engineeringArtificial intelligence