Ontology-based approach to extract product's design features from online customers’ reviews

Abstract Online customer reviews provide new potential customers with relevant information about a product or service. It has been empirically shown that the type of reviews (positive or negative) a product receives significantly impacts its future sales. In this paper, the online customers’ reviews analysis for the identification of key product attributes to be used in the conceptual design phase of a product is outlined. Our goal is to bring a value-added link between the Middle of Life phase to the Beginning of Life phase in the closed-loop product lifecycle management (PLM) by developing an ontology-based reasoning system to provide information that represents the customers’ opinions for the product's conceptual design. The main contributions of the proposed approach are the integration between the ontology and the natural language processing system in extracting the customers’ reviews data in the overall framework. The utility of the proposed approach is shown through the application on the digital camera product review dataset from Amazon.