Preference-based item recommendation is an important technique employed by online product catalogs for recommending items to buyers. Whereas the basic mathematical mechanisms used for computing value functions from stated preferences are relatively simple, developers of online catalogs need flexible formalisms that support the description of a wide range of value functions and map to scalable implementations for performing the required filtering and evaluation operations. This paper introduces an XML language for describing simple value functions that allow emulating the behavior of commercial preference-based item recommendation applications. We also discuss how the required scoring operations can be implemented on top of a commercial RDBMS, and present directions for future research.

Key words: Most online shops today organise their product catalogue in a feature-oriented way. This can cause problems for shoppers who have only limited knowledge of product features. An alternative is to organizing product information in a needs-oriented way. Here possible ways of using the product build the focus of attention. In this study we compared reported preference of catalogue access of non-expert shoppers when confronted with either feature-oriented or needsoriented access to a catalogue of digital cameras.

One of the key elements of e-commerce systems is the online product catalog. It provides sellers with a content management system that assembles, aggregates, normalizes, and distributes product information. It also provides potential buyers with an interactive interface that offers a multimedia representation of the product information as well as retrieval, classification and ordering services. In this paper, we discuss the interface of online product catalogs, focusing on its ability to help shoppers navigate and analyze product information. Specifically, we present a new interactive interface for online product catalogs that is effective in navigating through the product information space and analytically selecting suitable products. It uses a multi-dimensional visualization mechanism based on parallel coordinates and augmented by a number of visual facilities for filtering, tagging, color-coding, and dynamic querying. To demonstrate the capabilities of the product catalog interface for online retail stores and marketplaces, we implement a prototype displaying a set of automobile data. We explain how the prototype visualizes the entire product information space in a single page and supports intuitive exploratory analysis with the visual facilities. Keywords: electronic commerce, product catalog, visualization, user interface 2 1

Abstract not found

Preference-based item recommendation is an important technique employed by online product catalogs for recommending items to buyers. Whereas the basic mathematical mechanisms used for computing value functions from stated preferences are relatively simple, developers of online catalogs need flexible formalisms that support the description of a wide range of value functions and map to scalable implementations for performing the required filtering and evaluation operations. This paper introduces an XML language for describing simple value functions that allow emulating the behavior of commercial preference-based item recommendation applications. We also discuss how the required scoring operations can be implemented on top of a commercial RDBMS, and present directions for future research.