Phygital: Toward the empowerment of the customer and the competitiveness of the retail businesses

With the advent of technology, the retail industry has undergone a significant transformation in the few recent years. Living in the digital era means living in an era where the customers have access to digital tools and information at all times and everywhere. Customers are becoming more tech-oriented, and their expectations are changing rapidly, they also became more demanding regarding many aspects of their shopping experience. And with this free knowledge came the desire to be seen differently, not just the user and the destroyer of goods and services but also an involved stakeholder in the creation process. In response, retailers have been forced to adapt to the new reality and incorporate technology into their businesses. One such adaptation is the concept of phygital - the integration of digital in physical retail spaces, to create a seamless and personalized shopping journey that meets the evolving demands of customers. This article aims to explore, through a critical literature review how the phygital approach can empower customers and make retail businesses more competitive

Towards a unified methodology for supporting the integration of data sources for use in web applications

Organisations are making increasing use of web applications and web-based systems as an integral part of providing services. Examples include personalised dynamic user content on a website, social media plug-ins or web-based mapping tools. For these types of applications to have maximum use for the user where the applications are fully functional, they require the integration of data from multiple sources. The focus of this thesis is in improving this integration process with a focus on web applications with multiple sources of data. Integration of data from multiple sources is problematic for many reasons. Current integration methods tend to be domain specific and application specific. They are often complex, have compatibility issues with different technologies, lack maturity, are difficult to re-use, and do not accommodate new and emerging models and integration technologies. Technologies to achieve integration, such as brokers and translators do exist, but they cannot be used as a generic solution for developing web-applications achieving the integration outcomes required for successful web application development due to their domain specificity. It is because of these difficulties with integration, and the wide variety of integration approaches that there is a need to provide assistance to the developer in selecting the integration approach most appropriate to their needs. This thesis proposes GIWeb, a unified top-down data integration methodology instantiated with a framework that will aid developers in their integration process. It will act as a conceptual structure to support the chosen technical approach. The framework will assist in the integration of data sources to support web application builders. The thesis presents the rationale for the need for the framework based on an examination of the range of applications, associated data sources and the range of potential solutions. The framework is evaluated using four case studies