Ontological subscription and publication system with automatic notification of matching advertisements, products, and services within the ontological system for buyers and sellers

摘要

The present invention relates to an ontological subscription and notification system of advertisements from sellers to buyers. An ontology is defined within a controller (e.g.: a database, a computer program running on a server, etc) and sellers of products can submit/publish data representing a product(s) or service(s) via the internet to the controller that the controller then matches to its ontology hierarchy and stores in a computer database or other storage mechanism. A buyer of product(s) or service(s) can submit subscription data representing a product(s) or service(s), ontological category level, desired price range (and other ontological subscription criteria such as expiration date for notifications of matching products and services from sellers, product properties, quantity, seller distance from buyer, etc) via the internet to the controller that the controller then matches to its ontology hierarchy, stores in a computer database or other storage mechanism. The controller periodically (or continually) queries the database to determine if any of the buyers subscription data matches a sellers published product(s) or service(s) or falls within the ontological child-category of a parent-category or within any range within the ontology specified by the buyer. Potential buyers then have the option to be notified of the matching sellers published product(s) or service(s) via email, instant message, SMS, telephone, etc. The method and apparatus of the present invention have applications on the Internet as well as conventional communications systems such as voice telephony.