An Ontology-Based Architecture for Consumer Support Systems

For enterprises, customer relationships have been commonly recognized as a critical factor to succeed their business. Effective customer relationships could help enterprises deliver services to customers based on their needs, preferences, or past transactions. This model however emphasizes on the use of customer information for benefiting enterprises; customers in contrast receive less information from enterprises. To address this issue, a new paradigm, namely Consumer Support Systems (CSS) is initiated to support effective information provision for customers to help on their decision making. In this paper, we present an ontology-based architecture for such a new CSS paradigm. The architecture starts from the identification of CSS characteristics, through the recognition of architectural components that support the realization of these issues, and finally ends with the specification of collaborations among architectural components to realize these issues. In particular, for those inherent integration issues in CSS, it imposes semantic ontologies on the specifications to facilitate integration among customers and enterprises. The architecture is modeled by UML and illustrated by a CSS for travel arrangement.