Interactive product browsing and configuration using remote augmented reality sales services

Real-time remote sales assistance is an underdeveloped component of online sales services. Solutions involving web page text chat, telephony and video support prove problematic when seeking to remotely guide customers in their sales processes, especially with configurations of physically complex artefacts. Recently, there has been great interest in the application of virtual worlds and augmented reality to create synthetic environments for remote sales of physical artefacts. However, there is a lack of analysis and development of appropriate software services to support these processes. We extend our previous work with the detailed design of configuration context services to support the management of an interactive sales session using augmented reality. We detail the context and configuration services required, presenting a novel data service streaming configuration information to the vendor for business analytics. We expect that a fully implemented configuration management service, based on our design, will improve the remote sales experience for both customers and vendors alike via analysis of the streamed information

Choosing Attribute Weights for Item Dissimilarity using Clikstream Data with an Application to a Product Catalog Map

In content- and knowledge-based recommender systems often a measure of (dis)similarity between items is used. Frequently, this measure is based on the attributes of the items. However, which attributes are important for the users of the system remains an important question to answer. In this paper, we present an approach to determine attribute weights in a dissimilarity measure using clickstream data of an e-commerce website. Counted is how many times products are sold and based on this a Poisson regression model is estimated. Estimates of this model are then used to determine the attribute weights in the dissimilarity measure. We show an application of this approach on a product catalog of MP3 players provided by Compare Group, owner of the Dutch price comparison site http://www.vergelijk.nl, and show how the dissimilarity measure can be used to improve 2D product catalog visualizations.dissimilarity measure;attribute weights;clickstream data;comparison

Situational Enterprise Services

The ability to rapidly find potential business partners as well as rapidly set up a collaborative business process is desirable in the face of market turbulence. Collaborative business processes are increasingly dependent on the integration of business information systems. Traditional linking of business processes has a large ad hoc character. Implementing situational enterprise services in an appropriate way will deliver the business more flexibility, adaptability and agility. Service-oriented architectures (SOA) are rapidly becoming the dominant computing paradigm. It is now being embraced by organizations everywhere as the key to business agility. Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX on the other hand provide good user interactions for successful service discovery, selection, adaptation, invocation and service construction. They also balance automatic integration of services and human interactions, disconnecting content from presentation in the delivery of the service. Another Web technology, such as semantic Web, makes automatic service discovery, mediation and composition possible. Integrating SOA, Web 2.0 Technologies and Semantic Web into a service-oriented virtual enterprise connects business processes in a much more horizontal fashion. To be able run these services consistently across the enterprise, an enterprise infrastructure that provides enterprise architecture and security foundation is necessary. The world is constantly changing. So does the business environment. An agile enterprise needs to be able to quickly and cost-effectively change how it does business and who it does business with. Knowing, adapting to diffident situations is an important aspect of today’s business environment. The changes in an operating environment can happen implicitly and explicitly. The changes can be caused by different factors in the application domain. Changes can also happen for the purpose of organizing information in a better way. Changes can be further made according to the users' needs such as incorporating additional functionalities. Handling and managing diffident situations of service-oriented enterprises are important aspects of business environment. In the chapter, we will investigate how to apply new Web technologies to develop, deploy and executing enterprise services

Situation-Based Shifts in Consumer Web Site Benefit Salience: The Joint Role of Affect and Cognition

This study addresses the process by which differences in web site benefit salience arise in consumers’ minds for different anticipated usage situations. We investigate two routes by which situation may determine consumer benefit salience and find support for both route structures. The results indicate that individuals’ relative benefit importance ratings shift between different anticipated usage situations, both directly, and indirectly, through consumers’ anticipated affective states. Furthermore, the number of benefits that is rated as important by consumers is found to also differ depending on their anticipated affective states, providing further insight into why consumer benefit salience may vary across situations.affective route;cognitive route;situatieafhankelijkheid;usage situation;web site benefit salience;HD9696.82

Moving from Data-Constrained to Data-Enabled Research: Experiences and Challenges in Collecting, Validating and Analyzing Large-Scale e-Commerce Data

Widespread e-commerce activity on the Internet has led to new opportunities to collect vast amounts of micro-level market and nonmarket data. In this paper we share our experiences in collecting, validating, storing and analyzing large Internet-based data sets in the area of online auctions, music file sharing and online retailer pricing. We demonstrate how such data can advance knowledge by facilitating sharper and more extensive tests of existing theories and by offering observational underpinnings for the development of new theories. Just as experimental economics pushed the frontiers of economic thought by enabling the testing of numerous theories of economic behavior in the environment of a controlled laboratory, we believe that observing, often over extended periods of time, real-world agents participating in market and nonmarket activity on the Internet can lead us to develop and test a variety of new theories. Internet data gathering is not controlled experimentation. We cannot randomly assign participants to treatments or determine event orderings. Internet data gathering does offer potentially large data sets with repeated observation of individual choices and action. In addition, the automated data collection holds promise for greatly reduced cost per observation. Our methods rely on technological advances in automated data collection agents. Significant challenges remain in developing appropriate sampling techniques integrating data from heterogeneous sources in a variety of formats, constructing generalizable processes and understanding legal constraints. Despite these challenges, the early evidence from those who have harvested and analyzed large amounts of e-commerce data points toward a significant leap in our ability to understand the functioning of electronic commerce.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000231 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Product information management for complex modular security systems

Um sistema PIM gere toda a informação que possibilita a comercialização dos produtos através de diferentes canais. A sua importância durante o ciclo de vida de um produto aumentou devido à sofisticação técnica dos produtos, a gerir internamente e a publicar externamente. Sistemas, tais como o ERP e o CCMS, deverão integrar-se com um sistema PIM, o qual deve funcionar como a “espinha dorsal” da informação de produto. O presente projeto tem como objetivo principal a criação de uma solução para gerir a informação de produto para sistemas modulares complexos. A proposta de solução inclui a criação de uma ontologia para parte dos inúmeros sistemas disponíveis no catálogo de produtos de uma das maiores organizações multinacionais do setor de engenharia e tecnologia a nível mundial. O processo de criação da solução proposta baseou-se na metodologia de investigação pesquisa-ação e foi dividido em cinco fases. Na fase de diagnóstico descreveu-se e analisou-se a atual situação dos sistemas ERP e CCMS que gerem o catálogo online dos sistemas de produtos comercializados. Levantaram-se ainda as taxonomias de produto atuais e elaborou-se a proposta. Na fase de planeamento da ação descreveram-se a equipa de trabalho, a abordagem inspirada na metodologia Agile usada para desenvolver a solução, as reuniões de planeamento, os parceiros de trabalho, as ferramentas a usar e a sua justificação. Na fase de tomada de ação foi descrito o processo de criação da solução ontológica e o resultado final, incluindo a construção das novas taxonomias e a sua validação pelos especialistas. Propuseram-se exemplos e representações gráficas usando a ferramenta Protégé. Na fase de avaliação, a solução ontológica foi testada, tendo-se validado que os requisitos necessários foram satisfeitos pela estrutura. Na fase de especificação de aprendizagem propuseram-se os próximos passos para a implementação e gestão futura do modelo ontológico. Com esta solução, a organização poderá gerir mais eficientemente a informação de produto e a estrutura de dados. Ela possui versatilidade para gerir produtos individuais ou sistemas modulares complexos e melhorar a sua comunicação com o cliente. Além disso, a ontologia tem ainda um enorme potencial se combinada com técnicas de IA. Algumas limitações do projeto e propostas de trabalhos futuros foram ainda apresentadas

Value-driven Security Agreements in Extended Enterprises

Today organizations are highly interconnected in business networks called extended enterprises. This is mostly facilitated by outsourcing and by new economic models based on pay-as-you-go billing; all supported by IT-as-a-service. Although outsourcing has been around for some time, what is now new is the fact that organizations are increasingly outsourcing critical business processes, engaging on complex service bundles, and moving infrastructure and their management to the custody of third parties. Although this gives competitive advantage by reducing cost and increasing flexibility, it increases security risks by eroding security perimeters that used to separate insiders with security privileges from outsiders without security privileges. The classical security distinction between insiders and outsiders is supplemented with a third category of threat agents, namely external insiders, who are not subject to the internal control of an organization but yet have some access privileges to its resources that normal outsiders do not have. Protection against external insiders requires security agreements between organizations in an extended enterprise. Currently, there is no practical method that allows security officers to specify such requirements. In this paper we provide a method for modeling an extended enterprise architecture, identifying external insider roles, and for specifying security requirements that mitigate security threats posed by these roles. We illustrate our method with a realistic example

Intelligent Decisional Assistant that Facilitate the Choice of a Proper Computer System Applied in Busines

The choice of a proper computer system is not an easy task for a decider. One reason could be the present market development of computer systems applied in business. The big number of the Romanian market players determines a big number of computerized products, with a multitude of various properties. Our proposal tries to optimize and facilitate this decisional process within an e-shop where are sold IT packets applied in business, building an online decisional assistant, a special component conceived to facilitate the decision making needed for the selection of the pertinent IT package that fits the requirements of one certain business, described by the decider. The user interacts with the system as an online buyer that visit an e-shop where are sold IT package applied in economy.database, knowledge-base, decision tree, DSS, data mining, agents, reasoning, collaborative