The proposed XML-based metadata can facilitate resource discovery and format translation, and flexibly model the definitions of diverse attributes to describe goods in various product categories and data resources. Furthermore, in sup-porting personalized filtering within e-catalogues, the designed user model, with three-level user profiles, can model users’ shopping interests. With the multi-level design of both a user and merchandise model, the match process can be carried out efficiently to search and rank users’ preferred product items. The main advantage of using DIT in the search and match process is to travel to only a cer-tain sub-tree rather than traveling to all nodes to locate possible target resources.
Applying this approach, the system only needs to submit a customer’s query to target resources, rather than search all resources. The integrated search on the Internet can thus be conducted effectively.
Moreover, with the integration of XML-based metadata and user models, the designed agents can communicate and cooperate with other agents in resource discovery, format translation, ranking and filtering to achieve search results that satisfy customer needs. The novel system provides a structured query via the attributes of a selected product category, as well as supporting personalized product searches and browsing for each user based on their profiles. Also, with the support of personalized services, the novel e-catalogue system facilitates an effective, integrated search for heterogeneous goods information located in various virtual stores. A prototype system was developed to demonstrate the proposed work. This work not only facilitates business-to-consumer commerce on the Internet, but also contributes to the research on electronic commerce.
In the future, we will expand our system with a more general matching structure to provide a bi-directional suggestion to both customers and merchants.
Additionally, the refinement of user profile is a very vital issue to a profile-based information filtering system. However, the refinement of a user profile is a very challenging task. Since users may occasionally alter their preferences, maintaining a current user profile is difficult. In addition, if a user purchases a product item that does not match the behaviour described by user profile, the adjustment of user profile and the re-evaluation of each attribute and value need to be tackled carefully. Hence, user profile refinement provides a challenging topic that is worth future study. Furthermore, data mining techniques can be applied in e-catalogue applications to construct user profiles and provide suggestion services. In the future, we plan to integrate data mining techniques into our system.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the National Science Council of the Republic of China for financially supporting this research under Contract No. NSC 89-2213-E-009-019. In addition, the authors want to thank the four reviewers of JNCA of a first draft of this paper for their valuable comments that have assured that this paper has been expanded, corrected and modified to better fit into the framework of similar research efforts.
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Duen-Ren Liu received the BS and MS degree in Computer Science and Information Engineering from the National Taiwan University, Taiwan, in 1985 and 1987, respectively, and the PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota in 1995. He is currently an associate professor of the Institute of Information Management, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. His research interests include database systems, electronic commerce, workflow systems, and Internet applications. Dr Liu is an associate member of the IEEE and a member of the ACM.
Yuh-Jaan Lin received the BS degree in Computer Science from the Tung-Hai University, Taiwan in 1997, and the MBA degree in Information Management from the National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan in 1999.
He is currently a software engineer of AVerMedia Technologies, Inc. His research interests include electronic commerce, Internet applications, and embedded systems.
Chung-Min Chen received a BSc degree in Computer Science and Information Engineering from the National Taiwan University and a PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park. Currently, he is a research scientist at Telcordia Technologies (formerly known as Bellcore). His research interests include database systems and telecommunications.
Ya-Wen Huang received the BS degree in Computer Science from the National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan in 1997, and the MBA degree in Information Management from the National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan in 1999. His research interests include electronic commerce, information systems, and Internet applications.