Buyer's customized directory management over sellers' e-catalogs: logic programming approach

摘要

There is a multitude of seller-centric e-marketplaces in the Business-to-Business Electronic Commerce (B2B EC) environment. As the name implies, they are not organized from the buying organization's point of view. Thus, the buying organization needs to define a buyer-centric directory from the external e-marketplaces. This is particularly important in desk-top purchasing systems that use the internalized e-catalog. Recently, the one-to-one e-catalog approach is attempted to allow the buyer to select a sub-directory from a seller's directory. Although this is a helpful screening capability, there are still several problems to be resolved such as the mismatched level of details, directory depths unbalance, and changed category names. In addition, the integration with multiple sellers' e-catalogs and maintaining consistency with the dynamically changing sellers' e-catalogs should be supported. To overcome these problems, we adopt the logic programming approach because it can represent the structures of both buyers' and sellers' directories. Predicates as directory definition language can effectively represent the buyer's extraction of relevant parts from sellers' directories. The crudely selected directory can be modified using five directory modification rules. To control the application of these rules, we devised a top-down control algorithm. The algorithm could improve the depth and balance of the directory significantly, which will result in automatically generating more effective buyer's directory.