Modelling Consumer Knowledge: the Role of Ontology

Knowledge economy and further development of the information society made knowledge of all market interaction participants a key factor of consumption, adding value, including joint generation of value and innovation. Alongside with general increase in information volumes and decrease in consumer trust to it, the very products and services, as well as consumption technology and culture have become more complex and, thus, demonstrate relevance of managing consumer knowledge. Such complexity requires to teach consumers and to exchange knowledge with them. Consumer knowledge is of paramount importance for innovative products and services, as it is a key factor of innovation-decision process. Consumer knowledge practice needs clear understanding of this concept ("consumer knowledge"), its kinds and features, processes of acquiring and changing this knowledge, its influence on consumer behaviour, as well as company’s capabilities to establish consumer knowledge. Such understanding will be provided by creating ontology of innovative products and services’ consumer knowledge. Such ontology will help to resolve a whole range of enterprise engineering tasks: design of innovative products and services, as well as ecosystem surrounding them; design of an interaction system between a company and a consumer during a whole customer journey. This paper describes main requirements on ontology, discusses some existing ontologies, as well as contains primary results of ontology conceptualisation.