Deployment of personalized e-catalogues: An agent-based framework integrated with XML metadata and user models

In e-commerce applications, supporting electronic catalogues (e-catalogues) to provide product-search services on the Internet is emerging as an important function of electronic brokers (e-brokers). However, as the Internet expands, an increasing number of virtual stores are selling products on-line. The explosive growth of information is creating difficulties for customers searching for the product information they desire. In this work, an integrated framework is proposed to develop personalized e-catalogues. The proposed framework integrates XML-based metadata models, user models and agents. The XML-based metadata model can facilitate resource-discovery and format translation, and can flexibly model the definitions of diverse product attributes in heterogeneous data resources. The proposed user model can model a user’s shopping interests to resources, categories and products. This work integrates the agent technology with the proposed metadata model and user model to develop a personalized e-catalogue system. The novel system effectively provides an integrated search for heterogeneous product information, as well as supporting personalized product search and browsing for each user based upon their profiles.  2001 Academic Press